Mass Effect: Forged In Fire
by Kendris
Summary: ME1: They came from all corners of the galaxy. Human, turian, krogan, quarian, asari. Each of them had been shaped by their past, but it was their shared future that would forge the bonds that would let them stand together against the greatest threat the galaxy had ever encountered.
1. Akuze

_**Author's Musings**__ – A little late to the party, but my husband got me the ME trilogy set for my birthday this year, and the plot bunnies were hopping before I had finished the character generation for ME1._

_Ideally, this will be the start of a story arc that will cover the timeline of all three games. Real life being the unpredictable and frequently inconvenient creature that it is, I'm not making any promises as to update intervals. As with the BG series, it was the NPC's who captivated me, so expect lots of all of them, at least in the ME1 part, which is what this story will cover. Don't expect a lot of romance, as I found the romances in ME1 to be rushed, given the circumstances; I'll be focusing on the development of friendships between the members of the crew. Ash, Kaiden, Garrus, Wrex, Tali, Liara, Joker, Dr. Chakwas...loved 'em all._

_As with 'What Matters The Most' (and I will be continuing with that story until it is done), expect a mix of scenes from the game (with the focus on character thoughts/reactions) and my own headcanon of what went on in-between. I'll touch on game dialog at times, just to keep things familiar, but I figure that anyone who really wants a verbatim recap of game events can just play it again. Reviews/constructive criticism are always welcomed and replied to._

_**CE 2177**_

"What the fuck happened here?"

Second Lieutenant Jayce Shepard glanced up from her contemplation of the wreckage to meet the gaze of her senior NCO. Operations Chief Wyatt 'Buck' Hightower was a veteran of the First Contact War and more than twenty years of space exploration as a Systems Alliance Marine. If he didn't know what to make of what they were seeing, Shepard wasn't going to make any wild guesses just to save face.

"_Your NCO can make you or break you." _Her father had told her that more than once._ "If you get a good one, you __**listen**__ to them. Don't let yourself get hung up on rank. When you're under fire, those bars on your collar won't save your ass, but a good Chief just might."_

"Damned if I know, Chief," she murmured, nudging a corroded scrap of metal with a booted foot, crouching to examine it more closely. Akuze was a terrestrial planet with a thin atmosphere composed mainly of carbon dioxide and nitrogen, with enough heavy metal deposits in the crust to have made colonization by the Alliance a worthwhile endeavor. The colonists had been in place for just under a year when contact with the settlement had been lost. A Marine platoon had been dispatched aboard the SSV Bastogne, with the full expectation that they would discover that a damaged comm link was the reason for the silence.

The mood among the younger Marines had been a mix of high spirited bravado, lecherous talk about lonely colonist women and grumbling about wanting 'real' action. The more experienced members of the platoon had kept quiet, knowing what the rigors of colonial life – particularly in the mining colonies – did to the good looks of those who endured them, knowing also that when action did come, it would likely bring death in its wake. Instead of a shorted out comm buoy, scans from orbit had revealed no activity, either at the settlement or the dig site, and when the Marines had landed, they had found...this.

"Damned if I know," she repeated, standing and surveying the scene that stretched before her. The settlement itself had encompassed little more than a hundred square yards of precisely placed prefabricated modular buildings where the colonists slept, ate and worked when they weren't at the mine site. Atmospheric field generators had held a zone of breathable air over the settlement, enabling the colonists to conduct their daily activities without environmental suits, but they were expensive to operate, particularly since each square foot of the settlement was covered by at least two of the five generators, to provide a measure of redundancy in the event of mechanical or electronic failure. Settlement area was kept to the bare minimum required.

No degree of redundancy planning could have anticipated the current situation, however. The prefabs had been tumbled about like a child's blocks, their sides crushed and shredded, contents strewn across the ground. Three of the five generators had either been destroyed or knocked completely offline; the other two were operating on emergency power. The quadrant that Shepard's squad was searching showed some breathable atmosphere remaining, but none of them cared to test their luck by removing their helmets.

"No life readings, Lieutenant," Corporal Charlie Briggs reported, looking anxiously from the readout on his scanner to the surrounding wreckage. Shepard acknowledged his words with a nod and a sigh. It was confirmation of what the orbital readings had told them, but there had been at least a slim hope of locating survivors in the areas where some air remained.

"Where the hell are the damn bodies, then?" Hightower growled. He wasn't expecting an answer, which was fortunate, because Shepard had none to offer. The colony had held nearly a hundred members, including five families with children. All of the colonists had been equipped with personal transmitters, but not a single body had been found, nor a single transmitter signal picked up within a mile of the settlement.

"Batarians, maybe?" Private Jeff Drake suggested darkly, and an angry murmur rose up from the rest of the squad. Clashes with batarian slavers were a regular occurrence on ships moving through the Skyllian Verge, where the batarians disputed Alliance territorial claims, and there had even been raids on colonies recently, but Akuze was nowhere near the Verge.

"Batarians don't use acid," Shepard replied, shaking her head as she stepped up to a battered prefab unit that lay on its side with a massive hole melted through one wall and part of the ceiling. Similar damage could be found on virtually every surface in the wreckage, and spectrographic analysis of residues from the edges of the holes identified the cause: sulfuric acid, and a lot of it. Transporting it would have been a logistical nightmare, to say nothing of delivering it in the quantities that had to have been used here. And perhaps most telling, acid was an indiscriminate weapon that would damage the merchandise that the batarians most sought: slaves.

"They don't travel underground, either," Briggs observed, kicking a clod of earth toward the hole it had likely been thrown out of. The pits were scattered throughout the area: thirty feet deep or more, and seemingly connected by tunnels diving deep beneath the ground. Where they opened, the dirt was thrown back to a distance of twenty yards and more, indicating an eruption of great force from below the ground.

"All right, Hightower, take Charlie One and search the north half of our quad. Charlie Two, on me." The platoon had been divided into five ten-man squads, each consisting of two four-man fireteams, a senior NCO and a junior officer in command. Four of the squads were searching the settlement; the fifth, accompanied by Captain Thomas Manning, was searching the mine site, one kilometer to the west. "Look for survivors, bodies and anything that could tell us what did this."

The instructions were obvious, but Shepard knew they were expected of her. Her first command, small though it was, had gone from routine to anything but, and she was determined to do things right. When you were the offspring of not one but two Alliance military heroes, the only ones watching you more closely than the people expecting you to do things right were the ones just waiting for you to screw up.

As Hightower led his fireteam north, Shepard turned and headed south on point, aware of the other four falling in behind her in a staggered column; between the tumbled modules and the pits in the ground, no other formation was practical. Briggs and his scanner were directly behind her; Private Anne Tyler followed him, with Private Edward Jalowski behind Tyler and Private Joseph Lockwood on rearguard.

They picked their way cautiously through the wreckage of the settlement, stopping frequently to inspect the damage. They found no survivors, nor any clues as to the cause of the devastation, though scorching, holes and other evidence of small arms fire made it plain that at least some of the colonists had resisted whatever had attacked. An older model VT7 Grizzly was flipped onto its side, the roof peeled back like a tin can and acid burns marring almost every visible surface. Shepard ducked into the cockpit; acid damage had all but obliterated the control panel, and when she reached beneath the dash to retrieve the black box that recorded operational data, including camera views, she found the port empty.

_What the - _She felt around the floor, but found nothing. It wasn't unusual for colonists to remove the data recorders to conceal evidence of activities that might void their contract with the sponsoring company: mining an unmarked lode to sell under the table, or exceeding approved working hours to meet a quota. There were logical explanations for the absence, but it still added another piece to a puzzle that already seemed hopelessly jumbled.

She drew back, glancing toward the pilot's seat, and almost wished she hadn't. The pilot was gone, but whoever it had been had left a layer of cooked flesh and material seared onto the seat, with a few days worth of decomposition adding to the fun. Glad that her helmet protected her sense of smell, she leaned out of the wrecked vehicle.

"Briggs, get me a DNA kit," she ordered brusquely. If the tissue wasn't too deteriorated, they should be able to recover enough of a sequence to identify whoever it had come from; it was a safe bet they weren't still alive. Not with that much meat left behind. But where were they? Batarians didn't take dead bodies; no one did.

"Aye aye, Lieutenant," Briggs replied. "Found a body?"

"Maybe enough for an ID," she replied, watching the apprehension ripple across his face behind the shield of his helmet, knowing that he'd be even more apprehensive if he saw what was in the cockpit. The corporal was two years younger than Shepard and had not yet seen combat; few in the platoon had.

As he reached in the pouch at his hip for the DNA sampling kit, the scanner in his free hand let out a trilling alarm. "Contact!" he cried out, almost dropping the scanner as he fumbled to free his rifle from its sling, the rest of the fireteam reacting to his panicked actions by bringing their own weapons up.

"Hold your fire, damn it!" Shepard scrambled out of the Grizzly and strode toward Briggs, pulling the scanner from his hand and shoving the muzzle of his rifle down. "That's a Marine ID chip transmitter sequence, Corporal!"

"Oh, shit!" Briggs went white inside his helmet. "I'm sorry, Lieutenant!"

Shepard ignored him, studying the readout on the scanner. Single contact, fifteen yards. "Approaching Marine, identify yourself!" she barked out, turning in the direction the scanner indicated. "You are about to get your ass shot off!"

"Don't shoot!" a voice squeaked over the comm, and Shepard felt her heart sink as a slight figure stumbled around a pile of wreckage, even as a mixture of groans and snickers rose from the rest of the fireteam.

"Damn it, Private Riley, why aren't you with Bravo?" Shepard demanded irritably, knowing the answer before it came. Benjamin Riley was barely eighteen, fresh out of boot camp, and Shepard was damned if she knew why the kid had enlisted. A more unlikely soldier she'd never seen. Short and skinny, with a face scarred by acne and no aptitude whatsoever for military endeavors, he was the embodiment of the FNG both loathed and dreaded by the rank and file soldiers as the one most likely to get someone killed through sheer ineptitude. And he had, for reasons indecipherable to Shepard, latched onto her like a lost puppy.

"I – I guess I got separated from them, Lieutenant," Riley admitted miserably. "I heard something, but no one on my team would come, so I checked it out, and I found this." He extended the hand that he'd been cradling against his body, and Shepard found herself staring down at a kitten that seemed more dead than alive. Rail thin, and barely a couple of weeks old, it peered at the world through a single green eye; the other had been obliterated by an acid burn that was crusted and oozing, the black and white pattern of its fur all but indistinguishable beneath dirt and dried blood.

"It was under some crates in one of the prefabs," Riley went on hurriedly, as though sensing the officer's rising ire. "The mother was there, too, and three others, but they were all dead; it looked the mama cat tried to shield them with her body, but this little guy was the only one that made it."

The rest of the fireteam clustered around, peering down at Riley's find. "Colonies don't allow terrestrial pets," Jalowski said. "Something about the potential for interference with local biospheres."

"Guess somebody snuck them in," Tyler shrugged. "Pretty sure that an Alliance citation is the least of their worries right now."

It was the least of Shepard's worries, too. "You investigated an unknown situation without backup?" she asked quietly, trying to rein in her impatience. "You know better than that, Marine!"

"I tried to get them to help me check it out, but they wouldn't listen!" Riley repeated earnestly, close to tears. "As soon as I had him, I tried to catch up, but...I must have gone the wrong way. Couldn't I just fall in with you until we regroup?"

Shepard sighed and opened her comm link. "Bravo Leader, this is Charlie Leader. Are you by any chance missing a Marine?"

"Why yes, I believe we are," Second Lieutenant Douglas Bertrand replied, the lack of concern in his voice confirming Shepard's suspicions. "I take it you've gained one?"

"Affirmative," Shepard growled, knowing better than to give vent to her thoughts on an open link.

"Not sure why the captain didn't assign him to you in the first place," Bertrand offered carelessly. "Keep hold of him until we link back up."

"Will do. Shepard out." She killed the link, gritting her teeth. She wasn't any happier about Riley's piss poor skill set than Bertrand, but deliberately leaving him behind was a juvenile stunt that could easily have backfired. And wouldn't a friendly fire incident look great on her record?

"Lieutenant?" Riley was watching her with that kicked dog expression that irritated the hell out of her.

"Fall in, Riley," she sighed, ignoring the glares that the others shot her way. "Center column." No way could he be trusted on point or rear. "And if we run into trouble, you'd damn well better drop the cat and pick up your rifle." She was already bracing herself for the pussy jokes that were going to be flying once all the squads linked back up.

The almost pathetically grateful look he gave her irritated her even more. "I won't, Lieutenant. I mean, I will," he clarified hastily, opening the pouch at his hip, pulling things out willy-nilly: first aid kit, nutrition bars... Shepard watched in bemusement as item after item hit the ground. This couldn't be happening.

"See, Lieutenant?" Riley tucked the kitten into the now empty pouch and looked up at her, eager for approval. "He'll ride just fine there, and my hands are free!"

It occurred to Shepard that, with what she'd seen of his marksmanship, it might be safest for all concerned if he was holding the kitten instead of a weapon in a firefight. Lockwood met her eyes briefly and sighed.

"That won't work once we're away from the generators, Riley," he told the other private. "I'll help you rig up something off of your auxiliary port." Each of their environmental suits featured an auxiliary oxygen port that a squadmate could hook into if their suit's air supply was compromised; the kitten wouldn't put too much additional demand on Riley's system.

"Corporal, the DNA kit?" she reminded Briggs as Lockwood pulled out a length of air hose, and Tyler and Jalowski moved to retrieve the gear that Riley had discarded.

Briggs handed her the kit and followed her back toward the Grizzly. "I'm sorry, LT," he said in a low voice. "I should have recognized the signal."

She glanced back at him. "Think you'll recognize it when you hear it again?"

His reply was an immediate and fervent, "Yes, ma'am!"

She nodded. "Good enough, Corporal," she told him before ducking back into the vehicle. She'd made her own share of rookie mistakes, under both good and bad Commanding Officers, and she vividly recalled the shame of her error being compounded by the humiliation of being raked loud and long over the coals. She'd encountered some Marines who needed the reinforcement of a verbal dressing-down, but Briggs was the type who learned from his errors. Captain Manning wouldn't be hearing about the near incident from her.

_Take care of your team, and they'll take care of you._ More words of wisdom from her father. The men and women under Jack Shepard's command had followed him into hell and back, from his days as an NCO in the First Contact War through his battlefield commission and rise in the ranks during the subsequent years of colonization and expansion, when the Systems Alliance ships and soldiers had been humanity's chief defenders against a galaxy that was by and large indifferent at best, openly hostile at times to the newest addition to the spacegoing races governed by the Citadel Council. He'd retired from active duty last year as a General, taking a teaching position at the military academy on Arcturus Station, where he was quickly commanding the same fierce loyalty from his students

She entered the cockpit, running the sample swab through the mess in the driver's seat and sealing it into the preservative media. Instruments back on the Bastogne could compare the genetic sequencing with those on record for the Akuze colony.

When she emerged, Lockwood had managed to cobble together an oxygen tent in Riley's hip pouch using a plastic bag scavenged from the wreckage, and the kitten was once more stowed out of sight, the tubing snaking around Riley's side into the pouch the only evidence of its presence. She gave brief thought to not mentioning it in her report, but she knew that the word would spread like wildfire once the squads hooked back up; old women had nothing on soldiers when it came to gossip.

"LT, this terminal is still intact," Jalowski called from the ruin of a nearby prefab. "I can pull the local user memory cards."

She nodded. "Do it." The terminals they had found thus far had been either smashed or melted beyond salvage. Everything they had seen indicated that the destruction of the colony had been a sudden, catastrophic event, but there remained a chance that the daily computer entries of the colonists might provide some clues.

That done, they continued their sweep, finding a few more scraps of seared flesh to sample for DNA, and a couple more terminals intact enough to salvage, but no bodies or any definitive indications of what lay behind the destruction. When they met back up with Charlie One, Hightower lifted one bristly eyebrow at the sight of Riley, but said nothing, though the look on his face when the private pulled the kitten out of his hip pouch was almost enough to improve Shepard's mood.

The rendezvous point was the drop zone, one klick away from the colony; even before the debriefing, it was apparent that none of the other squads had discovered anything. The high spirits and horseplay of the journey out had been replaced with frustration, wary puzzlement and uneasy murmurings as the squads gathered around the troop shuttles.

"Squad leaders, assemble in the command shuttle," Manning ordered, looking around with the scowl that was a near-permanent feature of his expression. "The rest of you, get tents and generators set up. We'll camp planetside tonight and expand our search perimeter in the morning."

Judging from the expressions, no one was thrilled with the news, but no one was stupid enough to protest, either. As the enlisteds moved to retrieve the bivouac gear from the shuttle cargo holds, the five second lieutenants headed for the 'command shuttle', which was identical to the other four, its designation stemming from the fact that Manning had ridden in it for the drop. It was crowded; the shuttles each had enough seats to transport a dozen soldiers, but since Manning remained standing, the rest of them did, too, clustered in the minimal floor space of the passenger compartment.

"All right, report," the Captain growled. One by one, the squad leaders detailed what they had found, which was all but identical to what Shepard had encountered: no survivors, no bodies, and no clues as to what had caused the destruction. Jayce had known them all before being assigned to the platoon; they'd been at the Academy together: Adam 'Trip' Trippler and Gina Santorelli had been in Shepard's class; Mark Sanchez had been a year behind; Bertrand two years ahead. When the others were done, Shepard delivered her findings, pausing at the end before adding, "Private Riley discovered a dead cat that one of the colonists had apparently smuggled on-site. It had a litter of kittens; one was still alive."

"I am aware of that, Lieutenant," Manning replied, glowering at her. "What were you thinking, allowing him to cart the animal along? This is a Marine unit, not a zoo!"

Not a word to Bertrand about letting Riley become separated from his squad, and she knew there wouldn't be. Manning was a brass-kisser who preferred to command brass-kissers, and Bertrand was his current favorite, while Shepard was the daughter of the general who was the reason that Thomas Manning would never rise above Captain, and why he was assigned low-risk details with novice junior officers and green recruits. Shepard wasn't sure exactly what Manning had locked horns with Jack Shepard over; scuttlebutt was vague and varied, agreeing only on the point that Manning had definitely been on the losing end. And she got to reap the rewards.

_Buckle down and ride it out._ More advice, this time from her mother. While neither as brash nor as brilliant as her husband, Captain Hannah Taylor Shepard had a rock-solid reputation as an officer: steady under fire and skilled at diplomacy. A first lieutenant in the battle to retake Shanxi, she had risen steadily through the ranks of a military organization that frequently clung stubbornly to notions about gender that had been long abandoned by most of the remainder of human society. She hadn't done it by challenging the assholes head on; she'd done it by being consistently and undeniably better than the rest, doing her job and then some, proving herself to the ones whose opinions really mattered in the long run.

It was an ethic she'd instilled in her only child, and Jayce had known from her first few minutes under Manning that she'd be relying on it extensively. "It was the only thing we'd found alive, sir," she replied. "At this point, it appears to be the only survivor of the colony."

"You let me know how your interview with it goes, Lieutenant," Manning said, layering on a heavy dose of sarcasm, "and you are not to expend Systems Alliance resources on it, am I clear?"

"Yes, sir," Shepard answered crisply. He glared at her a moment longer, searching for any hint of insubordination in her words or tone. Finding none, he went on:

"Apparently, the batarians do not share the fondness that Private Riley and Lieutenant Shepard have for the feline species." From his tone, it was plain that he was trying for biting humor, but Jayce focused only on one word. Wary glances were exchanged between she, Trip, Gina and Mark; after a moment, it was Sanchez who spoke up.

"Batarians, sir?"

Dark eyebrows arched at the query. "Did I stutter, Lieutenant?" he asked quietly.

_Let it go, _Shepard warned with her eyes, but Sanchez responded, "No, sir. It's just that what I saw, and what the others have reported - the use of acid and the tunneling - don't fit anything I've heard about the way the batarians operate."

The eyebrows arched higher. "I was unaware that I had been graced with an expert on batarian tactics, Lieutenant. What have you _heard_?"

Mark flushed under the sarcasm, but held firm. "I'm no expert, sir. I only know what I've read about the batarians in my studies."

Shepard kept her mouth shut; she wouldn't help Mark's case by chiming in, but Trip spoke up. "Lieutenant Sanchez is correct in his assessment, sir. I've fought batarians in the Verge, and they don't utilize acid, or attack from beneath the ground. They leave the dead, too. There's no profit in transporting corpses, and the evidence we've found strongly indicates that at least some of the colonists were killed in the attack."

He was right, and Manning knew it; Shepard could see the flush rising on the back of the Captain's neck, the tightening of his jaw.

"And as the voice of experience," he said in a tightly controlled voice, "do you have an alternative to offer, Lieutenant Trippler?"

"I don't know, sir," Trip replied, his farmboy face open and earnest, "and neither did Chief Lane." Trip's senior NCO had almost as much time in as Hightower, and Trip was clearly troubled by the admission. "Sir, with all due respect, I think that we should contact Alliance forces at the Citadel. Maybe one of the other races in Citadel Space will have an idea of what we're dealing with."

"I agree with Lieutenant Trippler, sir," Sanchez said, swallowing nervously as the Captain's gaze snapped toward him.

"So do I, sir," Santorelli put in, head up and gaze direct, meeting Manning's glare without a hint of fear.

"So do I," Shepard said at last. She wasn't at all sure that adding her opinion wouldn't do more harm than good, but she couldn't stay quiet any longer.

Manning's jaw tightened further, a visible pulse leaping in the temple that Shepard could see. "Your suggestion that we create the appearance that Systems Alliance cannot manage its own colonial affairs is duly noted and rejected. This matter will be addressed in greater detail during your next performance reviews. For now, you are to return to your squads and oversee the setup of camp. Tomorrow, we will expand our search area, using ground penetrating radar to follow the tunnels back to the batarian staging areas. Lieutenant Bertrand, remain here to assist in determining tomorrow's search areas. The rest of you are dismissed." Bertrand didn't bother concealing his smirk as the rest of them snapped crisp salutes and turned to go.

"And Lieutenant Shepard?"

Shepard drew a breath through her nose and turned back, knowing that whatever Manning had to say was intended to goad her. "Yes, Captain?"

His expression remained bland, but his eyes glittered unpleasantly as he said, "Since you seem to have such a rapport with Private Riley, I'm assigning him to your squad. Instruct Private Lockwood to report to Bravo Squad.

He was waiting for her to get mad, _wanting _it, but Shepard could feel Gina's eyes on her back, warning her.

_Buckle down and ride it out. _ "Aye-aye, sir," she said, saluting again for good measure before turning and exiting the shuttle, chin up and back straight, a litany of profanity unspooling in the silence of her mind.

"Damn it," Trip muttered as they walked away from the shuttle, his expression grim. Sanchez looked like he was going to be sick; Gina's dark eyes were flashing with anger.

"You had to say something, Trip," Shepard told him. "I should have said more." If she was going to get fucked over anyway, she might as well have done something to feel like she'd earned it.

He shook his head, a cynical smile quirking his lips. "Hell, Shep, if you said that gravity pulls down, Manning would start trying to prove that it pushes up instead."

"And that asshole Bertrand would be right there, backing him up," Gina growled. "What say we have a blanket party later?"

Shepard indulged a brief and pleasant fantasy; the notion was a tempting one, but - "He's not worth it, Toad," she warned Santorelli.

The dark haired woman gave her an unrepentant smirk. "Says you, Badger." Gina's father had been killed in the First Contact War; her mother had remained with the Alliance, frequently serving alongside Hannah Shepard. Jayce and Gina had been spacer brats together, growing up on one ship or station after another. The nicknames had come from their mutual love of _The Wind In The Willows, _along with a certain 'wild ride' involving an Arcturus Station shuttle when they'd both been ten.

"She's right, Gina," Trip agreed. "Three years out of the Academy, and Bertrand's still stuck at the rank he graduated with? He's a dead-ender, and if he's dumb enough to think that hanging on Manning's coattails is going to get him anywhere, I'm willing to let him. The rest of us just need to hunker down and do our jobs. We'll get reassigned sooner or later."

"Yeah, but what about performance reviews?" Sanchez asked worriedly.

"Not gonna happen," Trip replied calmly, "because by the time we leave here, it's going to be obvious to anyone with half a brain that it wasn't batarians." His face settled into bleak lines as he spoke. "At that point, Manning is going to forget that he ever said it was, and he's not going to want the fact that he did as part of any official report."

"That sounds about right," Shepard agreed, watching him closely. "You OK?" Trip was colony-born; he'd been with his family on Mindoir seven years ago, when the batarians had raided it, killing or taking most of the inhabitants. Trip had seen his mother and sisters slaughtered, his father forced to undergo a cranial control chip implant with no anesthesia; he'd been saved by the arrival of Alliance troops, then been given a survivor's hardship scholarship to the Alliance Academy. Trip likely had the most direct experience with the batarians of any of them, including Manning, but the Captain either hadn't bothered to review the dossiers of his officers, or was an even bigger bastard than Shepard had believed.

"I'm fine," he assured her with a smile and a shrug. "Manning just thinks he's a badass; _we_ survived Gunny Demon."

That got grins from Shepard and Santorelli, and even a shaky laugh from Sanchez. Gunnery Chief Albert Damon had terrorized a decade and a half of Alliance cadets during PT. During the second week, he'd roared at Trip as he was bent over with his hands on his knees, puking up his guts halfway through a ten klick run, asking if that was how he'd bent over for the batarians like a cheap Asari whore. Trip had finished the run, swearing and crying, and spent two days in the infirmary afterward. They'd all hated the man that first year, but by the time of graduation, all but a few came to regard 'Gunny Demon' with a blend of respect and fierce pride.

"At least Gunny had a reason," Gina observed scornfully. "Manning's just an asshole, and incompetent to boot."

"Yeah, but he's our CO," Trip replied with a rueful look, "which means that we follow his orders."

"Right now, yeah," Gina conceded, "but what do we do when he gives us an order that we know is going to get us killed?"

"We deal with that when it comes," Shepard told her quietly. None of them had any doubt that it was a matter of _when, _rather than _if. _"Right now..." She trailed off, staring back toward the ruined settlement, all but lost in the encroaching darkness. "He didn't give any orders about _how_ we're supposed to bivouac, so we treat it like hostile territory. We set up a defensive perimeter, post sentries, get through the night."

"Sounds like a plan," Trip agreed, "and just to give us something to look forward to, how about the one whose Chief has the best reaction to Manning blaming the batarians buys the first round at Flux when we get to the Citadel?" He spoke to them all, but his blue eyes were on Jayce, the expectant look in them making her stomach do a pleasant flip-flop.

"You're on," she accepted with a laugh that was echoed by Mark and Gina. As she headed toward the spot where her squad was setting up, she felt the tension in her neck and shoulders starting to ebb. Shore leave on the Citadel, Flux, drinks and dancing. They just had to get through tonight and finish searching tomorrow, and they could get out of here. There was no one to save and nothing to fight; let the eggheads figure out the puzzle. Likely they'd never know for sure what had happened to the colonists, but she couldn't do anything about that. She just needed to do her job, keep her nose clean so that Manning had no excuses to discipline her, and wait for a better detail. Just ride it out.

OOO

"If this was fuckin' batarian raid, I'm a goddamn asari lap dancer," Hightower growled, provoking a mental image amusing enough that Shepard didn't mind that she was all but guaranteed to be buying the first round at Flux. Her amusement only lasted as long as it took her to duck inside the squad tent, however.

"Thanks a fucking lot, Riley," Lockwood snarled as he shoved his gear into his pack, the resentful glare he directed at the other private easing only marginally when he noticed Shepard's presence. "Lieutenant," he said curtly. "Corporal Toombs told me -"

"I know," she replied quietly, aware that she was walking a fine line. As little respect as she had for Manning, he was still the platoon's CO. Get a reputation for undermining the chain of command, and you were unlikely to advance on it. "Captain Manning's orders. You're a good soldier, Lockwood. Just focus on doing your job, and you'll be fine." Half the soldiers in Bertrand's squad seemed to be absorbing his assholery, like Corporal Toombs; the other half were desperately hoping for reassignment. Jayce hoped that Lockwood would prove resistant to whatever was in the water.

"Yes, ma'am," Lockwood replied resignedly.

"C'mon, Joe," Drake told him. "I'll walk you over." They ducked out of the tent, leaving Shepard alone with Riley...and the damn cat.

"What are you doing?" she asked, frowning slightly as she approached.

"Feeding it," he replied. "I crushed up one of my ration bars and dissolved it in water, then poured it into one of my spare gloves and put a little hole in the tip of a finger. He – he caught on quick."

He certainly had; the once half-dead looking handful of fur-covered bones was gnawing eagerly at the finger of the glove, paws kneading, tiny growls emitting from its chest, and the formerly hollow belly was now round and tight. "You treated the burns?" she asked, seeing the telltale gleam of medi-gel on lesions that were definitely not as inflamed as they had been only an hour earlier.

Riley nodded. "It was just a little bit" he said anxiously. "He's so tiny, it didn't take much."

All of this had undoubtedly been done while he should have been helping to set up the camp, and using Alliance resources, to boot. Maybe she should just write up her own reprimand, save Manning the time.

"Lieutenant?" Riley's timid voice interrupted her thoughts. "I'm glad I got assigned to your squad."

The look he gave her was meant to be ingratiating, but it only succeeded in pushing Shepard's simmering irritation past the boiling point.

"It's not a reward, Private," she snapped,"for either of us. You're not going to have any easier of a time under me, because I'm damned if I'll let somebody else get killed because you don't know how to do your job! What the hell are you even doing here?"

"You think I wanted to?" Riley demanded bitterly. "I never wanted this, but he -" He broke off and hung his head.

"Who?" Shepard wanted to know, but Riley shook his head.

"It doesn't matter," he whispered, his shoulders sagging in defeat. "I'll try not to be any trouble, Lieutenant."

_Don't try. Do it. _The words were on Shepard's lips, but she didn't let them pass. The satisfaction of having someone to vent her frustration upon had faded as the tears rolled silently down the kid's cheeks, and he still held the kitten so very carefully.

_Damn it. _She took a step closer, studying the way the burns had been dressed, and Riley flinched, as though he thought she was going to hit him.

"Have you ever thought about training as a medical corpsman, Private?" she asked him quietly.

"N- no, ma'am."

She nodded. "When we get done with this mission, I'll see what I can do about getting you into training." It was entirely possible that he would prove as inept at that as he had everything else, but judging from the care he'd given the kitten, it was the best chance he'd have...and it would get him out of her hair.

The almost pathetically grateful look that he gave her had a mixture of renewed irritation and guilt churning her guts into an acidic stew. "Thank you, Lieutenant."

She shook her head. "Don't thank me yet." She cocked her head, studying the kitten. "You named it yet?"

"No," he replied, pulling the glove away and scratching the unburned side of the tiny head gently. "He's a survivor; he deserves a special name, don't you think?"

Shepard nodded noncommittally, hoping like hell he didn't decide to name it after her. "I've got a book back on the Bastogne that you can borrow, might give you some ideas," she offered.

He looked up at her in surprise. "A real book? Pages and everything?"

"Yeah." She shifted uncomfortably, already regretting the impulsive offer. "In the meantime just...keep it out of the Captain's sight, all right?"

"I will, Lieutenant!" he promised, beaming at her as though she'd given him a field commission, then jumping to his feet to salute, cradling the kitten with his free hand.

"As you were, Private," Jayce told him as she turned to go.

OOO

"Why me?" Jayce lamented, staring up at the stars overhead.

"Because you're Badger," Gina replied. She and Jayce were sitting back to back outside of the camp, their rifles beside them and the few lights still functioning in the settlement gleaming faintly in the distance. Others had been assigned official sentry duty, but Jayce had been unable to shake the lingering unease, unable to relax enough to sleep, and Gina had stayed awake with her.

"I don't want to be Badger," Jayce pouted. "I want to be Toad for a while. You can be Badger."

"That's not the way it works," Gina told her. "I get us in trouble, you get us out. You'd make an awful Toad. You tried to talk me out of borrowing that shuttle."

"I believe that the term on the incident report was 'stealing'," Jayce reminded her.

"See?" Gina responded. "You get too hung up on little details like that to ever be Mr. Toad. You take care of people, protect them, like you always did the younger kids...and me. That's why Riley's glued himself to you. He knows you'll look out for him and Bertrand won't."

The quiet confidence in her friend's voice only increased Jayce's feeling of shame. "I don't want to," she admitted. "He's going to get someone killed and me reprimanded, and if I'm lucky, the only body will be his. I just want him to go away, be someone else's problem. That's the only reason I even mentioned the medic training."

"No, it's not," Gina replied. "You can tell yourself that all you want, but I know you. You even offered to let him touch your T.S. Eliot! Shit, you barely let _me_ handle it!"

"That's because it's old and fragile and you break everything," Jayce retorted. "Anyway, I only said that to keep him from naming the damn cat after me. We're already ass-deep in pussy jokes, and if he calls that thing Shepard, I'll never hear the end of it." Just the thought of it was enough to make her wince.

"Oh, yes." Even though she couldn't see Gina's face, Jayce could all but hear her eyes rolling. "And the sad thing is, I had every damn one of them listed in my head before anyone said anything. You'd think at least some of them could be original. And _they_ think they're hilarious." Her voice shifted tone, mimicking Corporal Donner, "_The only one to get any pussy is the one guy who has no idea what to do with it._" She sighed. "Men are such idiots."

"Most of them," Shepard agreed, hesitating for a moment before adding, "What do you think about Trip?"

She felt the shift, turned her head to find dark eyes gleaming at her with a knowing expression of mirth and impatience. "I think one of you needs to get off your ass and ask the other one out before I expire of old age and boredom. You two have been dancing around each other for years, both of you too damn duty-bound to make a move."

"You know the Alliance doesn't encourage fraternization," Jayce replied defensively. Her mother's ship had been among the responders at Mindoir, and she had brought Trip back to the station where the children of fleet members in that sector resided while their parents were deployed. He, Gina and Jayce had bonded, but the ties had been strictly platonic then as the two girls had helped him get past the grief of losing family, friends...hell, everything. It hadn't been until they were at the Academy together that Jayce had first realized that the currents between them were changing, but Trip was a gentleman, old-fashioned in a way that was rarely encountered in spacer society, and Jayce -

Gina made a rude noise. "Like that stopped your parents? Or mine, for that matter. They're not as touchy when the one you're banging is the same rank, anyway."

"Banging?" It was Jayce's turn to roll her eyes. "And here I thought you were developing a romantic streak, Santorelli."

"As if," Gina snorted. "Right now, I'd just settle for you getting laid more often, and his ass is to die for."

"If you like it so much, why don't you -"

"Because it's you that he's head over heels for, idiot," Gina cut her off, shaking her head in disbelief, "but if you don't make a move, I just might."

"All right, all right." Jayce couldn't decide if it was dread or anticipation churning in her stomach. "We're going out to Flux -"

"Along with everybody else," Gina replied dismissively, "but it's a starting point. You just need to get him off alone."

"How?" Jayce asked plaintively. It wasn't that she hadn't been involved with anyone before, but they had been short-term things, more about mutual physical attraction than anything else, and there hadn't been all that many of those since graduation. Not like Gina, who flitted from lover to lover like a butterfly in a flower garden, and still managed to stay on good terms with most of them.

"Leave that to me, Badger," Gina replied in a smug tone that set the warning bells ringing, "but if I come up with a brilliant plan, you'd damn well better follow through and get that man naked."

"I will," Jayce promised, but Toad was having none of it.

"Pinky swear," she insisted, shoving her right arm behind her, pinky extended.

"Seriously?" Jayce demanded in exasperation, but she was smiling. "We're not twelve any more. My word as an officer isn't enough?"

"Not for anything important," Gina asserted, keeping her arm extended. Jayce sighed, reaching out to link her pinky with her friend's, shaking to seal the bargain.

"Happy now?"

"Yep." Gina wrapped her arms around her knees and leaned back into Jayce smugly.

"You gonna tell me what you're going to do?"

"Nope." Gina shook her head firmly. "I give you too much lead time, and you'll start trying to poke holes in the plan. You do much better when you improvise...and it's more fun for me."

"All right," Jayce sighed, knowing that arguing would do nothing but encourage her to be even more creative. "I'm going back to the tent, get some sleep."

"Sweet dreams," Gina offered in that absent way that Jayce knew meant that she was already developing her plan. "What the - did you feel that?"

The sudden sharpness in her voice made Shepard pause in the middle of pushing herself upright. "What?"

"The ground. It just shook." Gina sat up straight, both palms splayed on the ground, her expression intent. "There it is again!"

"What the hell?" Jayce could feel it now: a vibration in the earth beneath her feet, growing stronger every second. Moments later, the shrill tones of proximity alarms sounded from within the camp, and the voice of one of the sentries blared over the comm.

_"Got a contact, half klick out northeast and closing fast!"_

_"What is it?"_

_"Can't tell...signal's distorted, but it's big -" _

"What the hell is going on?" Manning's voice, thick with sleep, from the direction of his private tent.

"_Christ, there's another one closing from due north and - fuck, there's something coming up right under us!"_

The shaking was growing more violent. Jayce exchanged a wide-eyed look with Gina, and they both dove for their weapons as the world exploded.

_"Shoot it! Shoot -"_

_"Captain! Lieutenant! We're under attack! We are under - Oh, my God! What is-"_

"Platoon, form up into fire teams!"

Jayce hit the ground hard, her rifle flying from her grasp as clods of earth rained down on her and a massive shape loomed upward.

"Gina!" She couldn't see where her friend had landed. She scrambled to recover her rifle and regain her feet on the shuddering ground, craning her head, trying to make out the form that was cast in a riot of shifting shadows by the lights that had been sent tumbling. What in the hell _was_ it?

"Jayce!"

_"Lieutenant! Captain Manning! Somebody help-"_

"Damn it, I said form up into fire teams! That is an ord-"

_"Badger!"_

OOO

_**CE 2183**_

Lieutenant Commander Jayce Shepard jerked awake, her heart thudding dully in her chest. Not the raw-edged panic that had gripped her hard during the long weeks of recovery. On some level, she remained aware that it was a dream, but there were still several moments of disorientation and desperate hope that it had all been a dream, that she was still on board the Bastogne, that she would roll out of her bunk, assemble her squad and drop onto Akuze to investigate the colony there with Trip and Gina and that bastard, Manning.

As always, though, disorientation faded and memory reasserted itself, settling beneath her breastbone with a dull ache that would persist for several days until she no longer noticed it...until the next time. It was a cycle she had grown familiar with; the nightmare returned faithfully at the start of any new assignment. Gina, Trip, Manning and the rest were dead, had been dead for six years. She was in temporary quarters at Arcturus Station; tomorrow, she would be reporting for duty as the Executive Officer on the SSV Normandy.

The warm mass nestled into the curve of her waist shifted and crawled onto her chest. A single green eye, luminous in the glow from the bedside clock, regarded her steadily as Mac extended his head forward until his nose brushed hers. She reached a hand up to scratch his ear, and was rewarded with a rumbling purr as the eye slipped shut.

She glanced at the clock, sighed. Six more hours until the alarm, and she wouldn't be falling back to sleep any time soon. Lifting Mac by the scruff, she set him aside and sat up, turning on the bedside light; he immediately moved to settle into the warm spot she'd left behind, watching as she stood and walked over to the doorway, gripped the bar that had been secured a foot below the top of the frame, flipped upside down and hooked her knees over the bar.

She didn't bother counting the vertical crunches: arms crossed over her chest, up slow, hold, down slower. She'd done her regular workout regimen that morning; this was therapeutic. Up, down, up, down, again and again until her abs were burning, thighs screaming, sweat soaking her skin and nightclothes.

_Stronger._

She switched to pullups, alternating in front and behind the bar, pushing for speed this time, until her shoulders and arms were on fire.

_Faster._

To the floor now for pushups, plank position, weight on her toes and knuckles, body held rigid as elbows and shoulders flexed and extended. Up, down, up, down, lactic acid heat building in her muscles, sweat stinging her eyes, breath hissing in her throat.

_Better._

She sank to the floor, lay there for a time, feeling the coolness against her skin. She rolled to her feet, stumbled to the shower, stripped down and leaned against the tile as hot water rolled over her, soothing the ache in her muscles to a drained weariness.

She dried off, pulled on a clean tank top and shorts and crawled back into bed, nudging Mac aside, then lifting him back onto her chest as she retrieved the book from the bedside table. Most of her collection was packed, but the slim volume was one that remained with her. Her free hand idly scratched at Mac's ear as she carefully leafed through the well worn pages.

_The naming of cats is a difficult matter._

_It isn't just one of your holiday games._

_You may think at first I'm mad as a hatter_

_When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES._

She had drifted off into dreamless sleep before the end of Growltiger's Last Stand.


	2. Shakedown Cruise

_**Theodur**__ – I think that's what drew me to the Akuze scenario: the fact that Shepard's survival was due more to luck than heroism or skill, with the subsequent impact on her psyche. Plus, it dovetails nicely with my plans for her personal subplot. Mac will be a recurring fixture, though with no real function beyond giving Jayce someone to wait on hand and foot, like any good cat owner should._

_Thanks for reviewing!_

OOO

"So, what do you think of the XO?" Lieutenant Jeff "Joker" Moreau asked Kaidan Alenko as the Normandy covered the final distance to the mass relay.

The other lieutenant gave him a cautious look. "What do you mean?"

Joker snorted. "Just what I asked. What. Do. You. Think? You've got to have an opinion." His eyes flicked away from the man in the co-pilot's chair to the display in front of him, the numbers confirming what he already knew: right on target. He'd been flying the Alliance's newest ship for two weeks, and every thrum from her drive, every minute vibration in her frame was transmitted to him in this chair, their meaning as clear as any words, if you knew how to listen.

"She's only been on board for two days," Kaidan replied, keeping his hands well away from the control panel. Protocol required the presence of a co-pilot when entering a relay in case instability developed, but the possibility was a remote one; in any other circumstances, the Normandy only needed one set of hands at the helm, and those hands belonged to Joker. Kaidan knew better than to get between a man and his ship. "I haven't had the chance to work with her much."

Joker managed not to roll his eyes. Alenko was so by-the-book that he probably shit regulation sized turds (and since Joker had encountered Alliance regulations for damn near everything else since joining up, he figured that the regs for appropriate length, diameter and weight to be produced at a given rank were dutifully laid out in some manual that had not yet been inflicted on him.). "I'm not asking for a performance review," he informed Kaidan with a smirk. "I mean, at least she's easy on the eyes, right?"

Kaidan's features scrunched into a disapproving frown. "If I have to choose between looks and competence, I'll pick the one that's most likely to keep me alive in battle," he proclaimed, just as though he hadn't been checking out her ass at dinner last night.

"Yeah, but ain't it nice not to have to choose?" Granted, none of them had seen Shepard in action yet, but since she'd been chosen by Captain Anderson himself, competence wasn't likely to be an issue. "Might as well have a nice view following her into battle, right?" He broke off at the look on Kaidan's face. "She's right behind me, isn't she?" Alenko nodded, looking as mortified as if he'd been the one talking. Joker swallowed hard, glancing over his shoulder to confirm that Commander Jayce Shepard had indeed arrived on the bridge. "No offense meant, ma'am," he mumbled, sinking a bit lower in his chair.

"None taken, lieutenant," she replied calmly, her eyes fixed on the screen and the steadily approaching relay station, its size dwarfing the formidable lines of the Normandy. Her tone was impossible to read, but there was the faintest hint of an amused smile touching her mouth, and Joker allowed himself a silent sigh of relief as he turned back to the task at hand. A sense of humor might not be quite as desirable as competence in an Executive Officer, but it beat out looks in his book any day.

He turned his attention back to to the task at hand, activating the comm system. "Approaching Arcturus Relay. Initiating transmission sequence. " His fingers danced over the control panel, making the minute adjustments to the final trajectory. He didn't look at the forward display; the readouts scrolling before his eyes told him all he needed to know. "Relay is hot. Acquiring approach vector. All stations secure for transit." He hadn't heard of anyone entering a relay with an airlock open, and he had no interest in going down in Alliance history as the first idiot to try it. In theory, an alarm should sound if there was an issue that could pose a danger, but he still visually checked each readout as the final distance was being closed. "The board is green. Final approach has begun. Entering relay in five...four...three...two...one."

The Normandy slipped through the gyroscopic rings and into the relay corridor as smoothly as a bullet being chambered in a rifle. In the next instant, there was the faint but unmistakable quiver of relay distortion along his nerves, there and gone almost before he could notice it, and the panorama of stars on the screen blurred into indistinctness before resolving again seconds later, their arrangement different from what it had been before.

What had once seemed a miracle had grown mundane with countless repetitions, and yet, the shit of it was: they _still _ didn't know exactly how the Protheans had pulled it off. Oh, there were scientific papers by the score detailing the absence of space and time in the relay corridors, enabling vessels to move almost instantaneously between linked relays, but not one of the races that made use of the ancient relays had been able to duplicate the technology to construct a new relay...or even maintain the old ones. It gave Joker the creeps if he thought about it too much, so he tried not to. Instead, he reviewed the readouts that were scrolling across his screens.

"Core temperature stable," he reported, hands moving with swift efficiency, talking to his big girl, feeling her answer him. "Stealth systems engaged. Drift," he paused to consult the nav computer, "just under 1500 k." He allowed himself a self-congratulatory smile.

"1500 is good."

Joker managed not to jump at the unexpected voice over his right shoulder, but it was a close thing. Kaidan's smirk made it clear that the bastard had known about Nihlus Kryik's arrival on the bridge. How the hell something that looked like a six-foot tall lobster could move that quietly was a mystery, but between the turian and the new XO, Joker was seriously considering installing a rear-view mirror at his station.

"Your captain will be pleased," Nihlus pronounced with a solemn nod before turning to leave, his movements remarkably unhampered by the stick that had to be up his ass.

"I hate that guy," Joker muttered once the coast was clear.

Kaidan gave him an exasperated look. "He gives you a compliment, so you hate him?"

"Remembering to zip up your suit when you leave the bathroom is good," Joker grumbled. "I just jumped us halfway across the galaxy and hit a target the size of a pinhead. That's not good. That's not even great. That's freaking fantastic." Modesty had never been one of his faults. "Besides, what's he doing on an Alliance ship, anyway?"

"The Council helped fund the Normandy," the other lieutenant reminded him, "and the turians helped design it. They have the right to want to see the results of their investment."

"Maybe so," Joker conceded reluctantly, "but that still doesn't explain why they sent a Spectre on her shakedown cruise. Something's up that they're not telling us."

"You're paranoid," Kaidan told him, shooting a wary glance at Shepard, whose attention seemed to still be on the forward display, where Eden Prime was slowly gaining in size with their approach, though it still only looked like a much brighter star in the stellar panorama.

"It's not paranoid if it's true," he retorted. "What do you think, Commander?" Alliance brass these days seemed to be made up of two main camps: humanity-first firebrands and Council ass-kissers. Most of the younger officers tended to gravitate toward the latter group; Joker was hoping the Normandy's new XO wasn't among their number.

Clear grey eyes turned to meet his, showing neither surprise nor irritation at his question. "I think the Council doesn't send Spectres on shakedown cruises," she replied after a moment's consideration. Before he could shoot Kaidan an I-win grin, she went on, "but the Captain will fill us in if and when we need to know."

The reproof was gently given but unmistakable, and Joker nodded, saying, "Understood, Commander."

As though use of his name had drawn his attention, the Captain's voice blared over the comm. "Joker, status report!"

"All systems green, sir," he responded promptly. "Stealth systems engaged and functioning normally. ETA to Eden Prime fifty-seven minutes."

"Good work, Lieutenant. Find a com buoy and link us into the network. I want mission reports relayed back to Alliance brass before we reach Eden Prime."

"Aye-aye, sir." If he hadn't already been suspicious, the tension in Anderson's voice would have sent red flags flying, but he knew better than to ask questions. "Fair warning, sir: I think Nihlus is headed your way."

"He's already here." Irritation crackled through the speakers, and Joker winced. The captain gave him a fair amount of leeway because of his unmatched skills, but he still managed to cross even the relaxed lines on a regular basis. "Tell Commander Shepard to meet me in the Comm Room for a debriefing."

"Aye-aye, sir." The link closed from the other end before Joker could kill it. "Commander -"

"I heard," Shepard replied, her eyes lingering on the forward display for a moment longer before she turned away. "On my way." She paused on her way out of the cockpit, glancing back. "Nice flying, Lieutenant."

"Thanks, Commander." When she was gone, Joker turned back to his work with a smug smile. "She's all right," he informed Kaidan in a tone that indicated that the matter had been settled.

OOO

"I hope that you know what you are doing, Captain," Ambassador Udina groused, not for the first time. "This is a vital assignment, and there were other candidates -"

"Shepard is my choice, Ambassador," Captain David Anderson replied - also not for the first time. Bureaucrats were a soldier's bane, and Udina was a bureaucrat's bureaucrat, more worried about covering his own ass than anything else. "Her service record speaks for itself. She's Alliance, born, bred and raised."

"She lost her entire unit on Akuze," Udina countered. "Such an incident can't help but leave a mark -"

"The events there were entirely out of her control," Admiral Hackett put in, as calmly as if Udina hadn't raised the issue previously. "It was a miracle that she survived, and a review of transmissions during the attack indicate that her conduct was everything that is expected from an officer and then some. She did all that she could to rally those who survived the initial assault after Manning died, but they had no idea what they were up against." There was an unmistakable edge to Hackett's voice that Udina responded to immediately.

"We had been given no intelligence on the existence of thresher maws, much less their destructive potential," the ambassador snapped. "Our so-called 'allies' did not consider them a hazard worth warning us about."

"It's done," Hackett replied simply. The final report had concluded that Captain Manning had erroneously attributed the attack to batarians, failing to call in a report of the undeniably odd circumstances encountered, a report that, at the very least, would likely have resulted in instructions to overnight aboard the Bastogne. In her debriefing, Shepard had been circumspect, confirming Manning's wrongheaded intransigence without overtly condemning the deceased CO on the record, though her anger had been obvious. Manning had paid the ultimate price for his misjudgment, however, and eviscerating his memory in front of civilians would not bring back the lost. "Shepard was not responsible for what happened on Akuze, and she has been an exemplary officer since then."

"She's got a reputation for being cautious with her crew," Udina observed in the tone of one discussing a critical fault. "Some would say too cautious. Sacrifices must be made at times for the greater good; humanity needs someone who can make difficult choices when they are required."

"Jayce Shepard will make whatever decisions are called for," Anderson replied curtly, annoyed by the ease with which the need for sacrifices was spoken of so easily those who would never be required to actually make the sacrifices themselves, "and I have full confidence that any deaths that occur under her command will not be needless."

"But can she hold up under the pressure?" Udina persisted. "With her family history -"

"Leave Michael Shepard out of this discussion." Admiral Hackett's tone brooked no opposition. "He is one of the most decorated soldiers in the Alliance, with three decades of dedicated service."

In the near-palpable silence that followed, Anderson could all but hear Udina weighing his options. "All right, Admiral," he said at last. "The Captain has made his choice; I hope it is the right one." Having made certain that his reservations would be on the official record, Udina killed the link.

"Good luck, Captain," Hackett offered. "Keep us posted."

"Will do, Admiral. Anderson out." He signed out, then immediately opened a new link.

"Mike. Good to see you," he said as his old friend's face came up on the screen.

"What the hell is going on, Dave?" Michael Shepard demanded, ignoring the greeting. He had earned limited communications privileges, but Anderson remained one of the few individuals with whom he was allowed unsupervised contact. Most of the time, his features retained their old, rakish handsomeness, but just now, there was a haggard edge to his face and a manic determination in his eyes that did not bode well for the conversation.

"We're shipping out," Anderson replied calmly. "Jayce came on board yesterday. Has she been to see you?"

"Yes. Last week." As always, any mention of seeing his daughter triggered a mix of happiness at having her visit, pride in her accomplishments and shame that she had to witness his current condition. "She said she had a new assignment. New ship. Top secret."

"That was all she was told, Mike," Anderson assured him. He'd kept most of his clearances even after his retirement following the PTSD diagnosis, but they had all been revoked following the snap in the aftermath of Akuze. "The Normandy is a brand new ship, just built and state of the art. We're taking her out on her shakedown cruise now. Mike, Jayce was the unanimous choice for the XO spot. It's a tremendous honor -"

"Shakedown cruise?" Mike cut him off. "Don't give me that shit, Dave. You've got a damn Spectre on board. Don't tell me that's the new Alliance protocol."

Anderson managed to keep his poker face intact. The man might have become a paranoid conspiracy nut, but he had lost none of his mental acuity, and enough former colleagues still held him in high regard to provide him with an information network that many intelligence agencies would envy. Add to that the fact that the man was a master at mining solid data from the flood of information on the extranet, and he retained the potential to be a significant pain in the ass to the Alliance, even locked up in the mental health wing of an Alliance retirement facility.

"He's a turian, but not a Spectre," he countered, hating the ease with which the lie came to his lips, wondering who had defied the gag order. "They had a hand in the Normandy's design and construction; we need his evaluation and input while we're putting her through her paces." The possibility of a human Spectre was still tenuous at best, and if word got out that Jayce was being evaluated, they could lose the chance for another twenty years.

"You expect me to believe that?"

"It's the truth," Anderson replied calmly. "Mike, this detail is a tremendous honor for Jayce...and a tremendous opportunity." His words had the hoped for effect: the belligerence left Mike's face, replaced by worry and guilt.

"I don't want to hold her back," he muttered, "but I'm her father, I should be protecting her, damn it. The bastards have done enough to her. I saw those memos, Dave. I _saw _ them."

"I believe you, Jack." He believed that Mike believed, anyway. After Akuze, he'd refused to accept the official explanation, and after some hacking on the extranet, had claimed to have found a set of memos that indicated that the incident on Akuze had been set up by some rogue black ops group named Cerberus...memos that had vanished from his hard drive when he tried to pull them up again. He'd gone off the rails after that, ranting about conspiracies and cover-ups, and when he had been caught trying to hack into restricted Alliance files, that had been the end of his career and his freedom. The brass had been as lenient as possible, opting for confinement in a mental institution for treatment instead of a court martial and incarceration, but given his refusal to renounce his assertions, it was increasingly unlikely that he would ever be released.

"You'll look after her, Dave?" Mike pleaded with him.

"Like she was my own, Mike. I promise," Anderson assured him, glad to be able to make that statement without dissembling. Jayce would be serving as his Executive Officer, and David Anderson took care of his crew. Beyond that, the Alliance had every reason to want Jayce to be fully successful in this endeavor.

Mike nodded, looking suddenly old and uncertain. "I know you think I'm crazy, Dave," he said. "Sometimes I do, too. Christ, I wish that I knew that I was, because if I'm not, then that Cerberus group is out there, and the Alliance brass is covering up what they did. That's not what I fought for; it's not what I want Jayce fighting for."

"She won't be, Mike," Anderson promised. "I'll talk to you later." Hopefully, the next time they talked, he would be able to tell his friend that his daughter had been made the first human Spectre in Alliance history.

He left his quarters, moving purposefully along the crew deck toward the curving stairway leading to the command deck, his eyes gauging the activity that he observed as he walked. Each member of the crew had been expressly selected for this detail, with years of service and solid performance reviews. Anderson himself had hand-selected a few: Dr. Chakwas, Navigator Pressley, Chief Engineer Adams, Joker (the only choice he'd had to argue for, but the helmsman's deft handling of the Normandy had silenced his critics). Most of the rest were unknown to him; far from an unusual circumstance in a new command, but he wanted at least a preliminary evaluation of their capabilities before the mission was fully underway. Things had been running efficiently, the crew thoroughly professional, but they had encountered no difficulties; the true test would come in a crisis, but he was more than willing to postpone that moment for as long as possible.

Nihlus had requested a few moments alone with Jayce prior to the debriefing; given that his evaluation of her was the primary reason for the Spectre's presence, it was not something that Anderson could refuse, but he wondered as he entered the comm room if he should have at least been present at the outset. The currents running between human and turian were not exactly hostile, but Jayce's posture was undeniably tense.

"Commander?" She turned at his voice, drawing herself up to attention. The sandy blonde hair, always looking slightly tousled, regardless of her efforts to tame it, and the grey eyes were mirror images of Mike; the calm reserve that she projected and the precise military posture were all Hannah. Jayce had idolized her father, but separate postings had kept the family apart for most of her childhood, with her mother assuming most of the childrearing duty. Their relationship had been stormy during Jayce's teen years, but they had grown closer in the aftermath of Akuze and Michael's breakdown. "Is there a problem?"

"No, sir." He'd known the young woman standing before him since her birth. He'd watched her grow from chubby infant to laughing toddler to scrappy spacer brat to cocky cadet. He'd been at the hospital with Mike and Hannah, waiting as she fought for her life and stood in the stead of her father in the weeks after, as she struggled to recover from broken bones and acid burns. He had been Uncle Dave to her since she could talk, but on the one occasion prior to this that she had served under him, as now, she had set it aside, referring to him as either 'Captain' or 'Sir' from the moment she set foot on the ship. "We were just discussing Eden Prime. Nihlus seems to feel that the colony may be in danger."

"I believe it is time to fill Commander Shepard in on the nature of our mission," Nihlus stated, with the usual disregard for protocol demonstrated by operatives in the Special Tasks and Reconnaissance group. Given the scuttlebutt that Anderson had heard, he hadn't expected Jayce to be surprised, but she showed no annoyance at having been kept in the dark; the grey eyes turned to regard him expectantly.

"We're out here for more than a shakedown cruise," he admitted.

She nodded, a faint smile touching her lips as she replied, "That's the general consensus among the crew, sir." Her eyes flickered briefly toward Nihlus, saying without words that the presence of the Spectre should have generated a more plausible cover story. "What's the mission?"

She listened intently as he detailed the discovery of the Prothean beacon, interest sparking in her eyes at the prospect of a trove of knowledge with the potential to rival or even exceed the cache on Mars that had catapulted humanity out of its own star system and into the galactic community. She knew no more about the Protheans than was taught to every student in school, but Anderson had little doubt that she would begin supplementing that knowledge with extranet research as soon as he released her. She had inherited Mike's talent for spur-of-the-moment improvisation, and learned Hannah's habits of meticulous preparation. Akuze could easily have shattered her; she had awakened from a two-week coma to find that her entire platoon - including her closest friend - had been slaughtered and her father institutionalized. After three days of a withdrawal that was close to catatonia, she had emerged, gripped by a determination that had propelled her through her recovery and beyond. She pushed herself relentlessly, haunted by the knowledge that her best had not been enough on Akuze, driven by the need to make herself stronger, faster, smarter..._better. _

One year after Akuze, she had been accepted into the Interplanetary Combatives Academy, the Alliance's special operations 'N-school', earning the coveted N7 designation and the rank of Lieutenant Commander in record time. Jayce Shepard was the best that the Alliance had to offer, and Anderson was confident that she was ready.

"There is another reason for Nihlus' presence, Commander," he went on. "He's here to evaluate you."

"Me?" That _did_ surprise her, but as her gaze shifted from him to the turian, comprehension washed over her features. "For the Spectres?"

So far, so good. She was cautious, but intrigued; you didn't make it to N7 by being an underachiever. "The Alliance has been pushing for this for a long time," he told her. "Humanity wants more say in developing interstellar policy. We want more say with the Council. The Spectres represent the Council's power and authority. Having a human accepted into their ranks would show how far the Alliance has come."

"Your survival on Akuze demonstrated considerable resourcefulness and resilience," Nihlus offered. He meant it as a compliment, but Anderson could all but feel the temperature drop in the air around Jayce.

"My survival on Akuze was largely a matter of luck," she informed the turian flatly. "The ones who died weren't lacking in resourcefulness or resilience...only proper mission intel."

"That was a grievous oversight," Nihlus agreed, glancing briefly toward Anderson; the faintest shake of the captain's head warned him against pointing out that all available records indicated that she'd fought like a demon, rallying the survivors of the initial attack and getting off a distress call to the Bastogne before they had been overwhelmed by a trio of thresher maws. Her ultimate survival _had _been largely a matter of luck: she'd been thrown into the wreckage of one of the drop shuttles, shielded from further attack until the creatures had been killed by rescue teams in heavily armed and armored vehicles that had been brought in on the SSV Beijing after the lighter rescue shuttles from the Bastogne had been taken out by the maws. And all because none of the Citadel races had thought to warn the novice colonists about the voracious predators whose resilient spores had allowed them to seed planets throughout the galaxy.

"Your record since then has given ample evidence of your abilities," Nihlus went on. "That is why I submitted your name for consideration as a Spectre."

"You?" Jayce's eyebrows rose visibly at the statement. She had been born three years before First Contact, grown up on ships and stations all over the galaxy. Xenophobia was not an issue for her, but she also knew of the general opinion that much of the galactic community had of humanity.

Nihlus' mandibles twitched in the turian expression of amusement. "I see the potential of humanity, Shepard, and of you. Dozens of potential candidates were screened: Alliance Intelligence, Marine and Naval officers, plenty of N7's, all of them highly qualified. You were the top choice, but if you succeed, you'll open the door for others."

Left unspoken but clear was the opposite side of the coin: screw it up and you'll kill their chances. David Anderson knew with bitter clarity what was at stake; there were plenty on the Citadel who would be happy to see the idea of a human Spectre put on the back burner for another twenty years or more.

Jayce knew it, too. "No pressure, huh?" she murmured, giving him a wry smile. "This is what the Alliance wants, sir?" That wasn't really what she was asking; her military bearing had slipped ever so slightly, and it was Jayce looking to her Uncle Dave for assurance.

"It is, Commander," he replied firmly. "They have every confidence in your abilities, as do I." He wanted to speak to her about her parents, tell her that they would both be proud of her, that this would stand a good chance of finally convincing her father to put his old suspicions to bed, but that would wait until they had the chance to talk alone, after they had retrieved the artifact from Eden Prime.

She nodded slowly, accepting his words, turned back to Nihlus. "All right, then. What do I need to do?"

"Nothing but what you usually do, Shepard," the turian replied. "I'll be accompanying you, observing your performance. This will be the first of several missions together."

"You'll be commanding the ground team on Eden Prime," Anderson told her. "Lieutenant Alenko and Corporal Jenkins will accompany you."

She nodded. "Jenkins is from Eden Prime," she informed Nihlus. "He'll be a good asset on the ground. Colonists aren't always happy to see the Alliance, but having a local boy on the team should smooth some of the ruffled feathers."

The turian blinked, cocking his head in puzzlement. "I thought it was called hair?"

"Figure of speech," Jayce murmured. "It means smoothing over bad feelings."

"Ah." Nihlus nodded gravely, visibly filing the knowledge away. "A turian would refer to it as 'settling the fringe'." He was trying, in typically stiff-necked turian fashion, to do some feather-smoothing of his own, and Jayce recognized the effort for what it was.

"Sounds like we'll have plenty of time to compare strange sayings," she told him, one corner of her mouth tugging upward. As smiles went, it wasn't much, but it was a definite improvement over the tension, and Anderson felt himself starting to relax until Joker's voice broke in over the comm.

"_Captain, we're picking up an emergency transmission from Eden Prime. You need to see this, sir."_


	3. The First Flames

Kaidan reached out to gently close the sightless eyes of Corporal Richard Jenkins. The look of surprise that had remained on his face when he'd fallen was fading as the facial muscles relaxed into the first stages of death. He looked like he was asleep...if you could ignore the hole burnt through his armor directly over his heart. They'd been doing a standard leapfrog advance; Jenkins had been moving forward when the airborne drone had popped up thirty yards ahead, drilling him through the chest before he could even get his rifle up.

_Damn it, Rick. You picked a hell of a time to forget how to duck._ The kid had been bursting with pride at the prospect of his family seeing him armored up as part of the ground team; he'd held it together when he'd been told of the ongoing attack, but he'd been terrified of what might be happening to his parents, his kid brother, their neighbors, determined to get groundside and defend his home, his people. He'd be staying here now, and Kaiden hoped like hell that his was the only death the Jenkins family would have to endure today.

Commander Shepard crouched beside him, reaching out to take hold of Jenkins' dogtags, breaking the chain with a sharp tug and tucking them into the utility case at her hip. "Just in case," she told him. "We'll come back when we're done, make sure he gets a proper burial, but until we know what we're up against..." She trailed off and he nodded his understanding. They could both be killed, fighting could overrun this position...hell, their unknown adversaries might decide to take trophies. There was no guarantee that they would be able to find Jenkins' body again. The dog tags might be the only memorial they could offer to his family.

She was still watching him, grey eyes sympathetic but serious. "I need you to focus ahead, Lieutenant," she told him. "I need you with me. Can you do that?"

He nodded. "I'm with you, Commander." The odds had been bad before; they were worse now. The Normandy had been carrying a full crew, but no complement of the Marines that traditionally served when boots were needed on the ground. He and Jenkins had been the only members of the crew that could be spared; the rest were frantically putting the frigate through her paces above, keeping the stealth systems engaged to keep her concealed from the enormous and unidentified warship that hovered over the colony and trying to gather intel for the Alliance reinforcements that were still over an hour away.

"All right." She raised up slightly, peering over the boulders that they had dragged Jenkins behind, seeing nothing but the remains of the two drones they had destroyed. "Now if we just knew where the hell Nihlus was." There was a definite edge to her voice; the Spectre, claiming that he could move faster alone, had gone ahead of them, ostensibly as a scout. They hadn't heard a word from him since a warning shortly after touchdown that the colony was crawling with hostiles, and he damn sure hadn't mentioned airborne drones.

She dropped down again, ejecting the ammo cubes and heat sinks from Jenkins' weapons. They each carried standard issue HK Lancer rifles and Kessler pistols; in addition, Jenkins had been issued an Avenger sniper rifle, and Shepard carried a Storm shotgun. Because all of them were manufactured by Hahne-Kedar, the ammo cubes and heat sinks were interchangeable, allowing for maximum adaptability in the field. "Can you use this?" she asked him, holding up the Avenger.

He shook his head regretfully. A sniper could be a good ace in the hole, but he'd never been trained. "My training focused chiefly on biotics and tech skills," he told her. He wasn't ashamed of it, but he'd encountered more than one CO who had scornfully dismissed the need for 'spoon-benders and wire-cutters'. Shepard, however, simply gave him a nod as she removed the ammo cube and heat sink from the Avenger and passed them to him, leaving the rifle by the body.

"If those drones are any indication, you'll be making good use of that training, Lieutenant," she told him, standing and studying the lay of the land, then consulting the map on her omni-tool. "We're about three klicks out from the dig site," she said. "We should be able to -"

"_Commander, I've got a burnt out farmstead here,"_ Nihlus' voice sounded over the comm. _"And a lot of dead bodies."_

"Damn it," Shepard said under her breath before opening the mic. "Roger that, Nihlus. Be advised that the hostiles are utilizing airborne drones; we lost Corporal Jenkins to one."

"_I've seen them, Commander,"_ the turian replied, ignoring the mention of Jenkins' death. Kaidan could see the muscles in Shepard's jaw clench. _"From the sound of it, there's still fighting going on. I'd suggest circling wide and approaching the dig site from the north to avoid it."_

Kaidan exchanged a glance with Shepard, who looked even less pleased than he felt. It was one thing to be told that aiding survivors was of secondary importance to securing the artifact; it was another thing to turn your back on fellow soldiers fighting for their lives. "Understood," she replied tersely. "We're moving out." She killed the link and pulled up the map once more. "This damn artifact had better be worth it," she growled under her breath.

How did you measure such things? How much Prothean knowledge was worth ten lives? A hundred? A thousand? The paradise of Eden Prime had been turned into a living hell, and all that Kaidan knew was that he was damn glad that it wouldn't be him facing the survivors with no greater comfort than the promise of some nebulous greater good served and a few posthumous medals to hand out.

He followed Shepard as she angled to the west, away from the main settlement of the colony and into the surrounding fields. They fell back into the leapfrog advance, keeping things tighter, eyes sweeping sky and ground as they moved from boulder to shed to tree in an arc that eventually had them on a southward course, approaching the dig site. On point, Shepard suddenly dropped into a crouch at the top of a rise, an upraised fist bringing him to a halt before a wave summoned him to her side behind the cover of a scrubby bush. She pointed to her eyes, then outward; he obediently peered through the branches, unable to make out anything at first.

Then he saw it.

A single figure in Alliance-issue armor, retreating...hell, _running_ from three – three what? Infantry battle mechs, without doubt, but the design was unfamiliar. They almost looked like -

_Can't be._ The soldier turned, sending a spray of fire toward the mechs before ducking behind the cover of a boulder. Sparks flew from the metal cowling from a couple of glancing hits, but otherwise, the pursuers were not affected, continuing their purposeful advance. The soldier leaned out from behind cover to deliver a more disciplined burst that made one of the mechs stagger backward, but Kaidan could see the smoke pouring from the rifle's frame; it had already seen enough hard use to exhaust the heat sink. The soldier tossed it to the ground, pulled a pistol, fired two more shots and ducked back into cover. The mechs paused, then spread out, the one who had been hit apparently not too badly damaged to continue. Seconds later, two aerial drones arrived from the direction of the settlement, circled the ground mechs once and then arrowed straight for the soldier's position, obviously intending to flush them out of cover.

The conclusion was all but foregone, and Kaidan felt sick. They had been given orders, orders that would require them to turn away and proceed toward the dig site, leaving the soldier to -

"No." Startled, he glanced at Shepard, seeing the stubborn set of her jaw and the flare of defiance in her eyes through the visor of her helmet. "_Hell_, no. Lieutenant, take out those drones!"

Without waiting to see if he would obey, she broke cover and took off at a dead sprint, rifle blazing as she crossed the ground between the mechs and the soldier. She wasn't aiming, and didn't score more than a couple of glancing hits. It was a maneuver designed to do one thing: draw fire, and it worked. The infantry mechs opened up: pulses of energy searing the ground and air around the Commander, but none of them managed to hit her before she dove behind the cover of another cluster of boulders.

The aerial mechs had also paused and turned, seeming to be deciding which target to pursue. Kaidan didn't give them the chance. He stood, feeling the power building as he released his hold on it. It hurt: he could feel the implants in his skull throbbing, and he'd have a bitch of a migraine in a few hours, but he had learned to work through the pain, ignore it to do what needed to be done. Strong emotion enhanced biotic abilities, and the frustrations of the last hour – the attack on the colony, the lack of adequate forces, Jenkins' death, the instructions to abandon their own soldiers – all added to the surge of norepinephrine and cortisol in his blood, boosting biotic as well as physical responses.

He was dimly aware of the blue glow that suffused his body, but most of his focus was on shaping the power. The eezo nodules in his nervous system generated the mass effect field; the implants and his bio-amp gave him the ability to amplify it, but truly controlling it was pure will, particularly for an L2. You had to want it more than you wanted to avoid the pain. He gritted his teeth, letting it build, his eyes locked on the two drones, picturing them as the stones in a giant slingshot. In the space between one heartbeat and the next, he released, white hot pain flaring behind his eyes as the mass effect field enveloped the drones and propelled them violently through the air and into a rock formation, bits and pieces flying in every direction in a shower of sparks.

He kept his eyes open through the pain, waiting for it to fade, kept his rifle ready. The infantry mechs stopped firing, their attention drawn by the fate of the drones. As their heads turned, the odd monocular optics seeking the threat, Shepard stepped from behind the boulders, freeing the shotgun from its sheath across her lower back with her left hand while her right sent one, two, three grenades sailing in a smooth sidehand arc. The ensuing concussions sent the mechs tumbling, and Shepard gave them no time to recover, advancing with the shotgun roaring. The weapon was slower than a rifle, but devastating at close range, and when the other soldier emerged and started firing the pistol alongside her, it was a matter of seconds before the mechs had been reduced to smoking spare parts.

Shepard stopped firing; the other one kept right on, stepping forward until they were standing over the piles of machinery and sending shot after shot into the wreckage.

"Ease up, soldier!" Shepard stepped in from the side, laying a hand over the other's wrist and pressing down. "Ease up. It's over. We got them. Ease up." Kaidan could see the smoke starting to curl from the pistol's frame, and he started down the rise, trying to get a clear enough view to put a biotic field around it before it exploded. By the time he was close enough, the soldier had dropped the pistol and spun away, reaching up to pull off their helmet and revealing a disheveled and sweat-damp tumble of dark hair.

"_Dammit_!" The woman shouted, bending over with her hands on her knees, blistering the air with a new oath with every panting breath. "Dammit, dammit, _dammit_! Mother_fucking_ sons of _bitches_!"

Shepard let her rant on for a bit, but the clock was ticking. "I need a status report, marine," she said, her voice calm but firm and pitched to cut through the shouts. "What happened here?"

The woman jerked upright as though someone had pulled strings, chagrin flashing over her features briefly before they locked back into discipline. "Gunnery Chief Ashley Williams, Commander," she said. "Second Frontier Division, 212 Unit, Dog Squad. What happened...oh, man." She drew an unsteady breath. "We'd been sent out to provide security for the dig site, but no one mentioned any specific threat. When those...things...attacked, we tried to get off a distress call, but the comm systems were the first things they went for. I've been fighting for my life ever since."

"What about the rest of your squad?" Shepard asked.

"Dead," Williams reported bleakly, her brown eyes caught between rage and grief. "All of them. Most of the scientists at the dig, too." Something rippled across the Commander's features, there and gone too quickly to be identified, but Kaidan remembered the rumors he'd heard about her history. About Akuze.

"Not your fault, Chief," Shepard replied quietly. "Are you injured?"

"A few scrapes and burns, ma'am," Williams said, squaring her shoulders. "I'm still good to fight." She glanced down to the burned out pistol with a rueful grimace. "Just need some weapons."

"Rifle or shotgun?" Shepard offered, holding out one in each hand.

"Shotgun," Williams replied promptly, accepting the Storm and checking it over with practiced motions, her agitation calming further at the familiar ritual. Shepard handed her a spare ammo cube and heat sink, the look she gave Kaidan communicating that it was unnecessary to say aloud what all three of them knew: they could pick up more weapons from the fallen members of the 212.

"Lieutenant Commander Jayce Shepard and Lieutenant Kaidan Alenko, SSV Normandy," Shepard said by way of introduction as Williams linked the computer system in her suit into their unit network, allowing secure communications and monitoring of each other's status. "Welcome aboard. Do you know where the Prothean artifact that was found is at?"

Williams nodded. "The dig site is about a klick southeast of here," she said confidently. "You think that's what those things are after? What the hell are they, anyway? I've never seen mechs like that."

"They're geth," Kaidan spoke up. Shepard glanced at him in surprise, then nodded slowly.

"I was hoping I was imagining the resemblance to the vids," she murmured ruefully. "You sure, Lieutenant?"

"As sure as I can be on nothing more than a visual," Kaidan replied. "I haven't seen anything besides old pictures and vids myself. The geth haven't been seen outside the Veil in two hundred years."

"And they come out of hiding for a Prothean artifact?" Williams asked as she moved out on point in response to Shepard's signal, shotgun at the ready. "What the hell is the thing?"

"It's supposed to contain a data cache, similar to the one found on Mars," Shepard replied, fading back and right, motioning Kaidan to take the left in the wedge formation, "and it had better hold something besides a recipe for Prothean friendship bread," she added under her breath.

"No joke," Williams muttered, glancing back cautiously, confirming the insignia on Shepard's armor. "No offense, Commander, I know you're N7, but shouldn't they have sent...more?"

Shepard chuckled. "No offense taken, Chief. I'd have preferred a squad or five myself. Alliance command got caught with their pants around their ankles on this one."

"And we're the ones who get our asses shot off," the NCO observed bitterly. "Sorry, ma'am, but -"

"Don't apologize, Williams," Shepard told her, her expression bleak. "Nothing said here is going in my mission report. Any ideas on numbers?"

"A lot," Williams replied grimly. "We took out at least three squads worth on the ground before those damn flying things showed up and started cutting us to pieces behind our cover. Maybe another two squads after that, and I still saw a lot headed for the spaceport. That ship looked huge; it could carry hundreds." She stopped, dropping into a crouch, her left fist upraised. Shepard and Kaidan went low behind her, eyes alternating between the terrain ahead and their point man until she stood, the fist shifting to an advance signal.

_"Ave, Imperator, morituri te salutant,"_ Shepard murmured. Williams looked back with a faint grin, and Kaidan realized for the first time that she was actually pretty good looking.

"Hail, Caesar, we who are about to die salute you?" she quoted. "My dad was a military history buff," she explained in response to Shepard's look of surprise. "I grew up with stories like that. Pretty grim, though, Commander." She didn't sound overly distressed, Kaidan noticed, and she strode forward as though eager for a confrontation.

"Not going to lie to either of you. If we're up against hundreds of those things, we're looking at long odds," Shepard admitted, her face hardening with resolve, "but I'm not getting us killed for nothing, either. Slow and steady, Williams; let's make sure we see them before they see us."

"Aye-aye, ma'am," Williams responded as she continued to advance. The Prothean ruins soon came into view: towering structures of stone and metal, crumbled with time but, considering the passage of fifty-thousand years, amazingly intact. Kaidan had been assigned to worlds with Prothean ruins twice before, and what intrigued him, then as now, was the mixture of the familiar and the unfathomable. Banal constructs such as stairways and doors stood alongside edifices whose function remained unknown: pyramids and spheres, arches and obelisks. Functioning technology was almost unheard of; the cache on Mars had led to leaps in human technology that would have been centuries in development otherwise, and ultimately to the discovery of the Charon mass relay. And for all the airs that the supposedly 'advanced' Citadel races put on, every one of them was in the same boat. All of them utilized Prothean technology as the basis for their FTL drives, all of them used the mass relays to travel through the galaxy, and not one of them fully understood how the relays really worked.

"Contact," Williams warned, stopping with her eyes fixed on the shotgun's combat scanner. "Three on ground, fifty meters, twelve o'clock."

Shepard nodded, peering ahead, but they were in a low area, and the Prothean ruins interspersed with boulder formations and rocky outcroppings jutting up from the ground. Good cover, crappy visualization. "Leapfrog until we get a visual. Chief, sing out if that count starts going up."

Williams ducked behind a boulder and, at Shepard's signal, Kaidan advanced rapidly, rifle ready and eyes scanning forward. Ten meters past Williams, he slid behind a rock formation, covering Shepard as she moved past to take cover behind a monolith that was too symmetrical to be natural.

Williams moved next. "Eyes on target," her low voice sounded over the comm, and he could see the change in her posture as alertness shifted up to battle-ready. "Three mechs, armed with rifles and – shit! Air drones incoming! They've spotted us!"

The quickly rising hum came on the tail of her words; two flying geth zipped into view and bolts of energy slammed into the rock where Chief Williams had taken cover. As the barrage ceased, she leaned out and squeezed off three shots in rapid succession, then ducked again as the drones opened fire.

Shepard stepped from behind the Prothean structure, sighting in on the drones. Two tightly controlled bursts of fire later, both of them fell from the sky in a shower of sparks and scattered pieces. "Still three on the ground?" she asked.

"Yep." Williams' eyes were burning with anticipation.

Shepard flashed a wolf's smile. "Payback time, then." She waited for Kaidan to advance to their position, then said, "Williams, after me. Alenko, you're on rearguard. Each of you wait a three-count before following." After waiting for their acknowledgment, she lifted her rifle and spun from behind cover. Rifle fire erupted immediately, the higher-pitched sound of the geth weaponry mixing with the reports from Shepard's Lancer. Williams' lips moved silently behind her visor, counting down, and then she was gone and the roar of the shotgun joined the din.

_One...two...three._ Rifle up, Kaidan lunged around the monolith, rifle up, ready to use either it or his biotics, but two of the geth were already down, and Shepard and Williams had the third caught in a deadly crossfire. It dropped before he could even take aim.

"Contacts?" Shepard demanded immediately, looking around warily. The monoliths were arranged in a symmetric circle around a slightly raised platform, but nothing that Kaidan could see gave any indication of the intended purpose of the structure.

"None," Williams responded in a dispirited voice; looking around the clearing, the reason was clear. This was where most of the members of Dog Squad had met their ends. Motionless bodies in Alliance-issue hardsuits lay sprawled where they had fallen, ravaged flesh exposed by melted and shattered armor. Some faces were hidden from view, others stared into the sun with sightless, unblinking eyes. Scattered among them were piles of destroyed geth, considerably outnumbering the dead humans in mute testament to the ferocity of the fight that had taken place.

Williams moved among them, bending to inspect their weapons almost mechanically, selecting a rifle, pistol and shotgun and pocketing extra ammo cubes and heat sinks from some of the others, retrieving the dog tags from each of the fallen. Shepard watched her in silence, her expression unreadable; when Kaidan took a step forward, intending to assist, she stopped him with a shake of her head.

The Gunnery Chief finished and strode back to Shepard, holding out the Storm. "I'm sorry, Chief," the Commander offered as she accepted the shotgun and stowed it.

Williams shrugged, her expression stoic, dull pain burning in her eyes. "Not your fault, Commander." She looked around, seeming to register their location for the first time, and her expression shifted to alarm. "Shit! The artifact...it's gone!"

"You're sure this is where it was?" Shepard was clearly aware that her question was a long shot.

Williams nodded. "It was right there," she said, pointing at the platform. "Tower-looking thing, three sided, maybe a meter a side, five meters tall. Made a weird humming noise and started glowing when anyone got close to it. It was here...maybe an hour ago."

And the spot had been overrun by geth. _Sonuvabitch._

As if on cue, Nihlus' voice broke in over the comm. _"Shepard, there's a small spaceport ahead. I want to check it out. Meet me there."_

"Roger that," Shepard replied. "The package has been moved. Repeat: the package has been moved. Don't know by who. The spaceport sounds like the most logical destination. How many geth can you see?"

"_Not more than a few dozen, all retreating toward the port,"_ the turian replied._ "Geth outside the Veil...the Council won't like this, and they'll like it even less if we lose the package. I'll keep my eyes open, just get here fast. I think they're preparing to withdraw, and if they get the package onto that ship that's blocking out the damn sun, there's no way we're getting it back."_

The comm went dead, and Shepard looked to Kaidan and Williams, her face serious. "All right, from what I've seen, the numbers he's talking about are within our capabilities. Chief Williams, do you concur?"

The Gunnery Chief looked a bit surprised at being asked, but recovered quickly. "I think so, ma'am, as long as they're not all together. They're accurate once they get a lock, but if you're moving, it takes them a second or two to reacquire. Targeting systems are in the head on the ground units; take that out, and they're as good as gone. The airborne units are fast, but their armor is light. They seem to be used for scouting and flushing targets out of cover."

Shepard nodded. "Kaidan, anything we encounter in the air is yours." She paused, watching him appraisingly, and Kaidan realized that she must have read his jacket, knew about the migraines that his biotics triggered.

"I'm good, Commander," he assured her, and meant it. After nearly twenty years of training, he was acutely attuned to the signals that his body sent. He could time the arrival of a skull-splitter to within five minutes, and generally estimate the severity. Currently, he was looking at a mild migraine eight or nine hours down the road; additional use of his talents would hasten and worsen it, but his hardsuit was equipped with a medical system that would deliver enough painkillers and cerebral vasodilators to keep him ambulatory, if they were still in the field when it hit. He would curtail the biotics once he approached the point of triggering a truly debilitating headache, but he still had a long way to go to get there.

She nodded again, accepting him at his word. "All right, then, let's move out. Chief, you're on point, I'll take rearguard. Double time!"

They moved swiftly through the outskirts of the colony, pausing only to talk with scattered groups of survivors, one of whom reported that a group of scientists had taken the artifact to the spaceport in a desperate attempt to keep it out of the hands of the invaders. Not the best news of the week, given Nihlus' report that the geth had been withdrawing to the port.

Still, they had encountered relatively little resistance, and had swiftly dispatched the small groups of geth that they met, but as they approached the outer perimeter of the spaceport, they began to see structures that didn't look like either Prothean ruins or Alliance architecture.

"What do you think they - oh, shit!" Chief Williams' query twisted into a gasp as they drew close enough to the tall, needle-pointed spires to see what adorned them: human bodies impaled three and four deep on the delivered shafts, limbs twisted and skin blackened.

"Bastards." It made no sense; the geth were machines, and mutilation of the dead was a cruelty that seemed at odds with the emotionless detachment of an AI. So, why - Something caught his eye, and as he was trying to convince himself that he couldn't have seen one of the lifeless limbs moving, a leg flexed, then an arm. "Oh, my God! They're still alive!" More movement, the bodies writhing as glowing blue trails branched across the blackened skin. "Commander, we have to get them -"

The spires suddenly retracted, releasing their captives, who gained their feet and promptly charged toward the three marines with a speed that belied their decrepit appearance, eyes glowing the same eerie blue as the markings on their bodies and mouths agape, though they remained unnervingly silent.

"Aww, crap," Shepard groaned, bringing up her rifle and opening fire. Her aim was true, but aside from being knocked off balance from the impact, the things didn't even seem to feel it; they just staggered, recovered and kept coming. Only when the head of one blew apart in a spray of pulp and bone did the body collapse in a twitching heap.

"Head shots!" Shepard ordered grimly, stowing the rifle and drawing her pistol as they closed in. Kaidan followed suit, taking aim at the trio that were coming at him. Four shots took down two, and then the third was upon him, flailing with a strength that more than compensated for the lack of technique. A blow to the helmet had stars dancing in his vision; a flare of biotic power flung the thing backwards far enough to let him draw a bead on it. Two more shots and it was down.

He turned, seeking his squadmates. Shepard was in hand-to-hand with two, fighting with a deadly efficiency that would have marked her as N7 even without the insignia. Williams was grappling with a single assailant, but two more were rushing her from behind. With no angle for a clear shot, Kaidan threw out a mass effect field, lifting the pair high into the air as the NCO gripped her opponent's head and drove it hard into her upraised knee, crushing the skull to pulp in three quick motions.

"Nice!" she shouted in approval when she turned and saw the two in the air. Out came her shotgun, and when the field dissipated, only pieces fell to earth.

"I never worked with a biotic," Williams told him with a smile. "Makes a nice hole card. You make it look easy."

"It's just like shooting," he replied modestly, though the compliment pleased him. He was as human as the next guy; it was nice to have his skills appreciated, and if the one doing the appreciating happened to be a pretty girl, so much the nicer, even if the policies on fraternization meant that smiles were as far as things could go. "You have to practice, develop the skills." And develop and maintain weapons skills, because there was a cool down period after you used biotic abilities...sometimes several minutes, depending on how hard you'd been pushing, sometimes less than a minute, but in combat, the difference between life and death was often found between one second and the next.

"The lieutenant is one of the top biotics in the Alliance," Shepard remarked, bending to wipe her hands on a tuft of grass. Kaidan opted not to look too closely at what she was wiping off. "But it's draining, regardless of skill. You need an energy drink?" she asked him, fishing a familiar-looking foil packet from her utility pouch and holding it up.

"Got one," he replied, digging into his own stash and pulling out the concentrated mix of electrolytes, carbohydrates, lipids and amino acids precisely formulated to support the metabolic demands of biotics. He tore off a corner, lifted his visor and downed the contents in two gulps, wondering when some enterprising soul would come up with flavors besides lemon-lime and fruit punch.

She nodded and put the one she'd offered him away. Shepard was not a biotic; she'd brought the drink along for his sake, and his growing estimation of the Commander rose another notch.

"Those were the colonists, weren't they?" Chief Williams was regarding the still twitching corpses with a mixture of revulsion and guilt. "What did those things do to them?"

"Don't know," Shepard replied, crouching to examine one of them, fingers tracing gingerly over the blackened skin. "Cybernetics," she murmured in surprise. "Wires running where the nerves and vessels should be. Somehow, those spikes changed them, turned the bodies of the dead into weapons."

"Dragon's teeth," Williams said, almost to herself. Shepard glanced at her and nodded grimly.

"Yeah, that's as apt a name as any," she agreed. "Ancient Greek mythology," she added in response to Kaidan's uncomprehending look. "The teeth of a dragon could be planted in the ground, and each one would grow into a fully armored soldier."

"They took their lives, then they took their bodies," Kaidan said quietly, unable to fully articulate the feeling of wrongness. "Their faces all look the same...hell, is there even any DNA left to analyze? It's like they stole everything that made them human and left these husks behind. These people didn't deserve this."

"They never do," Shepard responded. The words were pragmatic, but her eyes were shadowed as she stood. "We can't help them now. All we can do is try to keep it from happening to anyone else. This isn't your fault, Chief," she added firmly.

"I know that, Commander," Williams replied, though she didn't look as though she believed it. "It's just...ah, hell, let's just get to the port and find that artifact."

They pushed on, encountering a few more geth and many more husks, evidently left by the mechs to cover their withdrawal, and present in enough numbers that Kaidan had to wonder just how many colonists were still left alive. As they battled through skirmish after skirmish, he could feel them coming together, training and discipline forging their patched-together little group into an effective fireteam. Williams stayed on point, quick and alert; Kaidan could tell that she was hungry for combat, payback, but she controlled it, holding back when she identified geth on the scanner, attacking with them. She handled rifle, shotgun and pistol with equal skill, but she showed a definite preference for the Storm, wielding the shotgun with deadly efficiency when things got close.

Kaidan maintained his position in the middle; twice more, they encountered the flying mechs working with the ground units, and once they were buzzed by a single scouting unit. Each time, a quick surge of biotic power quickly neutralized the threat. Taken alone, each task was a simple one, but the effects on his body were cumulative, and he knew that he'd jacked up his incipient migraine by an order of magnitude and hastened the onset by a couple of hours. Shepard didn't question him when he elected to take the next scout out with a controlled burst of rifle fire, and he was relieved when he managed to dispatch it as quickly with that method as with his biotics.

He'd served under CO's that sent the rank and file up front as cannon fodder while they kept well back from the action; that wasn't why Shepard had taken rearguard. The Commander was an active participant in every engagement, switching from rifle to shotgun to pistol to bare hands as the fighting ranged from longer distances against the geth to up close and personal with the husks. Even in the heat of battle, Shepard maintained an almost preternatural awareness of those under her command, her voice coming in a steady stream of encouragement over the comm, calling them back when they started being drawn apart in a melee, warning them of a flanking enemy, checking for injuries after each fight.

"You're hurt," he observed after one fight, reaching out to examine the damaged armor over Shepard's left shoulder and the skin beneath.

The Commander waved him off. "It's fine," she said dismissively, though she winced visibly at the motion.

"The hell it is!" Williams exclaimed vehemently, possibly because the injury had been sustained in stepping between her and a geth rifle shot. "You've been slapping medigel on every little boo-boo we get, ma'am. You think we're going to let you ignore your own injuries? No way am I losing two CO's in one day!"

Shepard tried glowering, but it didn't work. She shifted the glower to Kaidan. He shrugged. "What she said, Commander."

The glower gave way to a sheepish expression. "All right," Shepard conceded, allowing Williams to treat the injury while Kaidan repaired the armor with an application of omni-gel. No assholes, no egos. Just three marines trying to keep each other alive, and despite the grimness of the situation, Kaidan liked that feeling.

OOO

"Damn it," Shepard growled, staring down at the dead body of Nihlus Kryik with a mixture of frustration and bafflement. While the spaceport showed signs of a pitched battle, and there had been no shortage of geth and husks, the turian appeared to have been felled by a single shot to the back, with his weapons still holstered. "What the hell gets the drop on a Spectre?"

"The other one killed him –" The three of them spun at the unexpected voice, leveling pistols at the poor bastard who dove back behind the crates he had been hiding among. "Don't shoot me!"

"Come out," Shepard instructed him, keeping her weapon up until a man emerged with his hands raised, wearing a dockworker's coveralls, clearly unarmed and looking ready to shit himself. She lowered the Kessler, but kept it out; their last battle was only minutes past. "What were you doing back there?"

"Hiding," the guy replied in a tone that said that the answer should have been obvious. "Those damn mechs killed everyone else; I didn't want to be next."

Shepard nodded, accepting the answer, but there was an edginess about the guy that wasn't ringing quite true. The other survivors they had encountered had been relieved to see Alliance Marines; this one seemed almost as fearful of them as he was of the geth.

"What other one are you talking about?" Shepard asked him.

"The other turian," the dock worker explained, and Shepard exchanged a glance with Kaidan and Williams. One of the scientists they had spoken to had been adamant about a turian being present immediately before the attack, but as he had also been ranting about the end of days, they hadn't taken him seriously at the time. "This guy knew him, called him Saren."

Shepard's grey eyes snapped back to the guy in surprise. "Saren Artorius?"

The worker shrugged. "He just called him Saren, but he definitely knew him. They talked, then the other guy shot him in the back and took the train to the terminal with a bunch of those mechs." He pointed toward the rail line. "You guys should go, see if you can catch him."

Williams had been eying the worker suspiciously during the exchange; now, she spoke up. "Powell, isn't it? You were under investigation for smuggling."

"Like that matters now?" Powell demanded.

"Depends on what you were smuggling," Shepard replied, eyes narrowed. "You wouldn't happen to have been behind those crates separating out a few choice items, would you? Get them," she ordered when his sullen silence provided the answer.

"You son of a bitch!" Williams exploded when he set the crate before them. Fifteen high explosive grenades.

Shepard regarded him coldly, then leveled her pistol at his face. "These grenades might have made the difference between life and death to the marines protecting your worthless ass," she growled, her finger tightening visibly on the trigger.

"Hey, I didn't know we were gonna be attacked!" Powell whined defensively. "C'mon, I won't do it again, I swear!"

"And you think that makes it all right?" the Commander inquired. Kaidan held his breath, releasing it – he honestly wasn't sure if it was relief or disappointment – when the pistol was lowered without being fired. "I don't have time for this," she informed Powell flatly. "Your name is going in my report, though, and I'd strongly suggest turning yourself in to the first Alliance soldiers you see, because if you don't and I find you, I'll gun you down where you stand. Load up," she ordered them as Powell slunk away, hooking grenades onto her weapons harness.

"Who's Saren?" Kaidan asked as he and Williams followed suit.

"Another Spectre," Shepard replied grimly. "The guy's a legend in Special Ops, but he's a known human hater."

"You think he's working with the geth?" Williams wanted to know.

"Sounds like it, but damned if I know why," Shepard answered. "Anti-human is one thing, but allying with a bunch of rogue AI's? Killing another turian? It doesn't make sense."

"Maybe we should ask him about that," Kaidan suggested, adjusting the weight on his harness to distribute the added load evenly.

"That's my plan," Shepard agreed with a thin smile, leading the way to the platform. They had to fight their way to the train; Saren had apparently considered them enough of a threat to leave a number of geth behind to slow them down, but they had settled smoothly into their combat roles by now, and the grenades let them even up the odds at a distance before closing with the enemy. Given the opposition they had met so far, Kaidan more than half expected the track to have been sabotaged, but the short trip from the warehouses to the terminal was uneventful. Unfortunately, upon arriving, they discovered that the reprieve had only been temporary.

"Time to put those tech skills to use, Lieutenant," Shepard announced as they stood over a large explosive device whose timer showed less than five minutes. "And not to put undue pressure on you, but my scanner is showing two more of these in the area, any one of which looks to have enough power to obliterate everything within a five klick radius." She didn't say anything more, didn't have to. If the scattered survivors were to have any chance at all, every one of the bombs had to be defused.

"On it, Commander," he replied immediately, dropping to his knees beside the device, doing his best to ignore the sounds of combat as Shepard and Williams turned their efforts to shielding him from the geth and husks who sought to disrupt him. He exposed the circuitry, and immediately sent up a silent prayer of thanks when the schematics were immediately familiar. He opened up the link with his omnitool, fingers dancing over the haptic interface.

"Got it!" he shouted, scrambling to his feet and retrieving his rifle from where he'd set it down.

"Let's move!" Shepard charged ahead, sending grenades sailing in advance, mopping up with the shotgun, Williams at her side, the two of them working together to clear his path to the next bomb. He spotted it, paused long enough to take out a geth that was attempting to flank the two women, then crouched beside it, seeing with no real surprise that it was set to the same countdown as the first, with less than three minutes to go. Not a problem for this one: the design was the same, and his omnitool already keyed for it, making disarming it the work of seconds. But how far away was the third? And were there additional devices they hadn't detected?

"Go! Go!" he shouted. They'd already pushed ahead, opening a corridor in the right direction, but they raced around a corner and found themselves facing a wall of geth with rifles blazing. Williams took a shot in the chest that knocked her down; Kaidan and Shepard dragged her behind a stack of crates. She was alive, but dazed. Ninety-four seconds left.

"Go!" Williams shoved her remaining grenades into Shepard's hands, her face white with pain. "I'll be fine; it's you they'll be shooting at!"

"We'll be back," Shepard promised as she stood. "Lieutenant, the last bomb is thirty meters ahead on the left; we make a hole and push through fast. I'll cover our six, you get to that thing and shut it down!"

Six grenades left. They each took three, stepped from cover and lobbed them toward the opposing line in quick succession. The ensuing detonations tore a number of the geth apart and left the remainder teetering in a cloud of smoke and debris. Shepard gave them no time to recover, running forward full tilt, unloading round after round from the shotgun, slamming it crosswise or butt-first into any opponent who got too close to be shot. Kaidan raced to keep up as she bulled her way through; his rifle wasn't as brutally effective at close range, but he managed to take out enough to widen the gap in the line a bit more. It felt like a lifetime, but only a few seconds passed before they were through the gap and Shepard waved him ahead, turning to provide covering fire as she backed toward the alcove where the third bomb had been left.

Forty five seconds. Kaidan tore back the panel, omnitool glowing golden as he linked in, finding the key circuits, isolating them, and -

"Done!" With twenty seconds left, he scrambled to his feet and took up position beside Shepard against the wall of the alcove; she had exchanged the shotgun for the rifle. "Any others showing up?"

"Nope, but this thing is short range: maybe half a klick." She leaned around the corner, squeezed off a barrage of shots, ducked back into cover, giving him a reckless grin. "Ask me again in thirty seconds."

In spite of the situation, he found himself returning the grin. They had done all they could; all that was left was to fight until they ran out of enemies or time. He leaned out, drew a bead on a geth and dropped it with three shots.

Ten seconds. "It's been an honor, Commander."

"Likewise, Lieutenant."

Five seconds.

Four.

Three.

Two.

One.

Shepard leaned out, shot, ducked back as a bolt of energy seared the stone next to her head. "Either my time sense is off, or three was it."

Kaidan peered around the corner; only three left standing. "We're at T-plus fifteen, Commander. Looks like we got lucky."

"Good." She stowed the rifle and brought the shotgun over her shoulder in a smooth arc. "What do you say we finish breaking these toasters down into spare parts and go back for our Gunnery Chief?"

OOO

Williams' earlier assessment had been correct: the geth had been focused on keeping the two of them from reaching the last device, and had ignored her completely. Unable to let the chance pass, she had dragged herself to the corner of the crates and managed to pick off a couple from behind. Shepard scolded her for that as she was applying a pressure wrap to stabilize the NCO's broken ribs, but there was a distinct lack of vehemence in her words.

Ribs wrapped and armor back on, they made their way through the spaceport, encountering only the occasional group of poorly organized husks that had evidently been left behind when the monstrous ship had departed during the running firefight with the geth. Of the mechs, nothing remained but the pieces of the ones they had taken down. An eerie silence had settled over the colony, deep enough to make it seem unsettlingly possible that they were the only living beings left.

"Need to report in," Shepard remarked as they descended into an empty terminal. "Get teams down here looking for survivors, get some samples from the geth and those...others." _Gather up the remains of the dead._ The unspoken words hung over them like a shroud. Jenkins, Dog Squad, the rest of the 212; how many Alliance lives lost today? More than Kaidan had ever experienced before, and more than he hoped to ever have to experience again, though he had a sinking feeling that this would not prove to be an isolated incident.

Williams started to reply, then peered ahead, surprise and disbelief rapidly giving way to elation. "There it is!" she exclaimed, striding ahead of them toward the edge of the platform. Shepard and Kaidan followed, stopping well away from the tower, which looked much as it had been described earlier, right down to the glow and hum that kicked in when they drew close.

"I'll be damned," Shepard murmured, studying the structure. "Why didn't they take it?"

"Maybe that wasn't what they were after?" Kaidan suggested, though it seemed unlikely.

Williams shook her head. "There's nothing else," she said definitively. "Everything else that's been dug up has been unremarkable...unless somebody's been hiding something." Her expression plainly said that she found the notion highly plausible; Kaidan couldn't blame her.

"Possible," Shepard agreed with a rueful grimace. "Or maybe they detected reinforcements arriving before they could get it loaded." Turning, she walked a short distance away as she hailed the Normandy. Williams frowned slightly and followed her, leaving Kaidan alone with the artifact.

The glow had dimmed when Shepard and Williams moved away, the humming subsiding to a barely audible thrum. It looked like stone of some type, but the faint green luminescence that coruscated over the surface in lazy swirls and waves was more suggestive of a charged metal. The patterns that formed, faded and reshaped were compelling, almost hypnotic. He took a step closer; metal or stone? Another step; the dim glow brightened and the hum began to increase. He backed away hastily, but instead of subsiding again, the sound and light show intensified further, and he cried out in alarm as he felt his body being engulfed by what felt like a biotic field, the pressure even and gentle, but relentless as it drew him toward the tower, lifting him until only his toes were on the ground."

"Shit! Commander!"

"Kaidan!" Running footsteps, then strong arms wrapping around his waist, dragging him back downward. The force surrounding him resisted briefly, then the glow dimmed, the humming dropped in pitch and the pull released without warning. Shepard hauled him away, twisting to put herself between him and the thing. He heard the hum rising again, but by the time he rolled onto his back to shout a warning, the tower was blazing like a beacon, and Shepard was wrapped in the same field that had caught him, already lifted well out of reach.

"Turn it off!" Williams shouted.

"How? No!" He put out a restraining hand as she raised her rifle. God only knew what shooting the tower might do. They watched in helpless horror as Shepard twisted in the forcefield like a rag doll being shaken by a dog. The glow flared even brighter, the hum rose to a roar, and the tower exploded without warning, the force knocking them both back and showering them with shrapnel that rattled against their hardsuits without penetrating.

Shepard hit the ground hard, lay motionless. Kaidan scrambled to her side, Williams close behind. "She's alive!" The rise and fall of her chest confirmed the readout on his omnitool. They each grabbed an arm, dragging her away from the tower; it was dark and silent now, the top half of it gone and the remains jutting skyward like jagged teeth, but neither of them felt like taking chances.

He activated the long range comm channel. "Normandy, can you read me? I need a medical evac ASAP. Commander Shepard's been hurt!"

"Copy that, Lieutenant. We're inbound. ETA three minutes." Joker didn't waste time asking for details, and Kaidan suspected he'd shave a good fifteen seconds off that three minutes. He also knew that his ass would be in for a grilling after they were back on the ship.

_My fault._ Why the hell had he gone near the damn thing? _Please don't die._


	4. Aftermath

_**J no K **__– It's a definite change of pace from WMTM, but I'm enjoying myself. As with the BG series, it is the NPC's in Mass Effect that grabbed me and wouldn't let go. I just finished my first playthrough of the trilogy, and the ability to interact with key squadmates & NPC's throughout all three was what really made it memorable. The ME3 Citadel DLC, in particular, was pure joy to play. Thanks for the heads-up on the Latin; I don't think I was too specific when I searched. I'll probably leave it as it is. Jayce's hobby is military history, not Latin, so it's not unlikely that she (or Ash) wouldn't get the translation perfect._

_Thanks for reviewing, and thanks to those of you who have placed this story and/or me on your favorite/follow lists!_

_OOO_

_"Be careful what you wish for, Corporal. The 'action' you are so eager for usually ends up with me patching up soldiers in my medbay."_

Routine words of warning, turned into dire prophecy. Karin Chakwas sighed softly as she transferred the medical files of Corporal Richard Jenkins out of the Normandy's active duty roster, typing in a final entry:

"_Killed in action, May 2, 2183, Eden Prime."_

He had been one of the good ones: full of the exuberance of youth and a hunger to prove himself, but without an unkind bone in his body. Time would have tempered his enthusiasm with experience, shaped his ambition into a dedication to duty, made him into a leader of men.

Or perhaps she was being fanciful. The harsh realities of combat could warp as well as shape. She'd seen promising young recruits turn into indifferent soldiers or worse, while some that she had never thought would last had risen magnificently to the challenge. And some - like Richard Jenkins - were cut off before they could even begin to fulfill their promise.

She'd long since left behind the romanticism that had led her to sign up with the Alliance fresh out of medical school, eager to participate in the exploration that the discovery of alien technology on Mars had made possible, dreaming of traveling to distant stars and planets, caring for rugged soldiers with piercing eyes and wounded souls, and losing her own heart in the process. The First Contact War had shattered her idyllic notions with the undeniable reality that the galaxy was a dangerous place, and while she'd had a few flings - some of which she remembered quite fondly - military men made poor prospects for long-term relationships.

Youthful idealism and romantic fancy had given way to a clear-eyed appreciation of the men and women who chose a life of service, and an awareness of the importance of her own role in that life. Her skill could tip the balance, ensuring that a well deserved medal was not awarded posthumously, that a young soldier lived to fulfill their potential or an older one to pass on their knowledge. They deserved her best, and she gave no less; she was the best damn trauma surgeon in the Alliance, a recognized authority in xenonotic diseases and alien biology, and second to none when it came to handling the medical needs of biotics, particularly those with the L2 implants. The Normandy boasted a state-of-the-art medical bay that would be the envy of any trauma center, with an expandable isolation unit and a fully equipped surgical suite. And all that skill and technology counted for precisely nothing when a soldier was shot through the heart with a high-energy pulse beam. She hadn't had the heart yet to review the casualty list from the Alliance forces on Eden Prime; thirty years into her career, she was more likely than not to recognize at least one name, probably more. Better to focus her energies now on those that she could still help.

"Doctor Chakwas? I think she's waking up!" Chief Williams' announcement brought her attention around to one of the two occupied beds.

"Stay put," she ordered Lieutenant Alenko as he tried to rise from his own bed. She had been able to convince him to lie down when the migraine hit, but the young gunnery chief had been pacing the medbay for hours, hovering over the other two worriedly. Her broken ribs were responding well to the osteocytic stimulants and would be fully healed within a day, but the physician knew that the loss of the rest of her unit had left deeper wounds that no technology could touch. She'd let her remain, assigned her the task of monitoring Shepard's vitals. Mostly an assignment intended to allow the soldier to feel of use and to focus on something besides the events on Eden Prime, but the EEG had been showing unusual spikes in brain activity, similar to patterns displayed during REM sleep, but considerably more pronounced. Odd enough that the doctor had actually felt more comfortable having someone else keeping watch while she was busy filling out her reports.

Shepard was indeed beginning to stir, with corresponding elevations in heart rate, respiration and blood pressure. Everything seemed stable, but the unusual brain activity was spiking, as well, and Dr. Chakwas moved to the bedside. Jayce's face was pale, the light sprinkling of freckles across her nose and cheeks standing out more than usual, and her features had tightened into an apprehensive expression, her head turning from side to side and her lips moving. She looked much younger than her twenty-nine years, almost childlike in those brief moments.

"Commander?" Chakwas kept her voice low and calm, coaxing her patient back to wakefulness. Shepard's eyelids fluttered, and the movement of her lips continued, rising into an incoherent mumble.

"What's she saying?" Williams asked, moving to the opposite side of the bed. Kaidan was sitting up, leaning over as far as he could to look over Ashley's shoulder while still obeying her instruction to remain in bed.

"I'm not sure," Chakwas replied, shaking her head. Disorientation was not unusual after being unconscious for an extended period, and without knowing exactly what the Prothean beacon had done to her, there was no way to know what to expect. "Commander Shepard?" she repeated, touching Shepard's shoulder lightly, without shaking her. "Jayce? Can you hear me?"

Grey eyes opened, looking up at her without comprehension. "_Vashat kai," _she murmured dazedly. "_Seg - segoth...vashat kai..." _

The words meant nothing to Chakwas. She exchanged a worried glance with Chief Williams, then turned her attention back to her patient, not allowing her worry to touch her voice. "Commander, you've been unconscious. Do you know who I am?"

Shepard blinked, still plainly confused, brow furrowing and mouth working soundlessly. Suddenly, her eyes went wide, and she bolted upright in the bed, one hand shooting out to seize the doctor's shoulder in a grip that was almost painful.

_"Vashat kai!" _She said in an urgent tone, looking directly into Chakwas' eyes, trying to communicate. _"Segotha te rekalit udonai!" _The words were clear, but they were no language that the doctor recognized.

Shepard turned her head, her gaze falling on Ashley. "_Vashat kai! Segotha te rekalit udonai!" _The words were the same, the enunciation precise, the meaning no clearer than it had been on the first utterance. Clearly aware that her words were not being understood, Shepard gave a frustrated hiss and pushed herself off the bed, swayed wildly and would have gone down, had not Ashley caught her. Kaidan's feet hit the floor a moment later, as the Lieutenant moved to support the commander's other side.

"Get her back into bed," Chakwas ordered, moving to pull up a dose of a strong sedative, her mind moving rapidly through potential diagnoses: concussion, retrograde amnesia, anteriograde amnesia, total amnesia...there were cases of individuals gaining fluency in previously unknown languages following head injuries, but -

"Doc?" She turned to find Shepard regarding her with lucid eyes. "What happened?"

She seemed calmer now, so Chakwas set the sedative aside for the moment. "What do you remember?" she asked, watching the commander closely. Pupils equal and appropriately dilated, no sign of nystagmus.

Shepard frowned slightly, eyes narrowed in thought. "We were on Eden Prime," she said at last, looking from Kaidan to Ashley for confirmation, clearly recognizing them both. "The geth had attacked, and we had just found that Prothean artifact -" Her eyes widened and she started to stand again, but Dr. Chakwas cut her off, retrieving an opthalmoscope from the tray beside the bed.

"Not so fast, Commander," she said in the no-nonsense tone that she had cultivated for moments - and patients - like this. "You had us quite worried, and I would prefer that you not end up unconscious again."

Shepard hesitated, then nodded. "How long was I out?" she asked as the doctor used the light from the instrument to check her pupillary response and evaluate her visual tracking.

"About fifteen hours," Chakwas reported, watching Shepard's eyes follow the movement of the light as it went from side to side, up and down. "There was some sort of incident with the Prothean beacon. How do you feel?"

"Headache," Shepard admitted, rubbing the back of her neck. "Muscles are sore, but other that, not bad." She turned her head, looking at Kaidan. "Did it do anything to you?"

"No, I'm fine," Kaidan asserted, though Dr. Chakwas could tell by the tightness around his eyes that the migraine was still lingering. "It was my fault, Commander," he confessed. "I must have activated some kind of defensive field when I got too close. I'm sorry."

Shepard shook her head. "No way to know that was going to happen," she replied.

"Actually, it's not even certain that was the cause," Dr. Chakwas reminded Kaidan, "and we'll likely never know now. Who is the Alliance ambassador to the Citadel Council?" This last was directed at Jayce, who gave her a long-suffering look before complying.

"Donnel Udina. And Anita Goyle before him. What do you mean we'll never know?"

It was Kaidan who answered. "It exploded, Commander. Overload, maybe...or maybe Saren booby-trapped it. It was destroyed, and it knocked you unconscious. Ash - Chief Williams - and I got you back to the Normandy." He looked a bit embarrassed at the slip; the two junior officers had graduated to a first-name basis over the last several hours, but Shepard did not seem to notice.

"Thanks," she said quietly. "I owe you both." She glanced at Ashley. "How are those ribs, Chief?"

"Just fine, ma'am," Ashley replied immediately, with a determination that gave Chakwas the strong suspicion that she'd have given the same answer if said ribs had been puncturing a lung. "The doc fixed me up good as new."

"The 'new' part doesn't apply until a full twenty-four hours has passed," Chakwas corrected her. "And I do want to see you again before I clear you for full duty."

"I'm - yes, ma'am," the gunnery chief said, quickly rethinking the instinctive protest.

"Never argue with the ship's doctor, Chief," Shepard murmured. "Especially this one." There was a faint gleam of humor in the grey eyes as they turned back to Chakwas. "My father warned me about you."

Karin snorted. She'd been patching up Michael Patrick Shepard all too regularly since Shanxi. "If you've inherited even half of his talent for drawing trouble, I'm the one who should have been warned, so I could double my medigel requisitions. Close your eyes and touch the tip of your nose with your right index finger, please."

Shepard complied, then opened her eyes and grinned. "Consider yourself warned, then. The home world of the asari is Thessia, the year is 2183, and if I've been out for fifteen hours, the date should be May third. Do I pass the neuro exam?"

"I see you've done this before," Chakwas murmured wryly. "You seem to be fine, but I'm a bit concerned about your brain activity while you were out. You exhibited very pronounced beta waves and rapid-eye movement more often associated with a dreaming state, and when you first awoke, you were speaking in a language that I could not understand." She paused, eying her patient shrewdly. "You don't remember that, do you?"

Shepard started to shake her head, then hesitated. "I remember...something. I was trying to warn someone-" She bit her lip, clearly troubled by the lapse.

Ashley put a hand on her shoulder. "It's all right, Commander. You seemed pretty out of it. Almost like you were sleepwalking or something." The look she gave Chakwas was a plea for support, and Karin realized that Jayce Shepard had inherited something else from her father; these two were more than halfway to being willing to follow her through whatever fire she led them into. It was a loyalty that every commanding officer craved, but few achieved. It took more than caring, more than charisma, more than courage; the right, indefinable combination of the three was a potent alchemy, particularly in the crucible that Eden Prime would have provided. Mike and Hannah Shepard both possessed it, though the mix was different in each of them. No surprise that they had passed it to their daughter.

"As I said, your brain activity and eye movements were suggestive of a very active dream cycle; it would not be unusual for the dream to linger into the first moments of wakefulness." She didn't lie, didn't coddle her patients; too much could be riding on them to risk turning a blind eye to a potential problem, and the translator chip, implanted in her mastoid bone and programmed with every known language in the galaxy, hadn't been able to make heads or tails of the words that Shepard had uttered. "Do you remember your dreams?"

"Destruction," Jayce reported somberly after a moment's pondering. "Death. Fire. I remember hearing something: a phrase, repeated over and over, but I could never make it out."

Dr. Chakwas nodded silently, turning to the medbay computer terminal and calling up the audio files that had been recorded minutes earlier.

"_Vashat kai! Segotha te rekalit udonai!"_

Jayce's eyes widened at the sound of her own voice. "That's it! That's what I heard!" She leaned forward, listening intently, then shook her head in frustration. "What does it mean?"

"Maybe nothing," Ashley suggested. "Dreams don't always make sense."

"What if it wasn't a dream, though?" Kaidan said, hastening to explain as three pairs of eyes turned to him. "What if what you saw, what you heard, was put into your mind by the beacon? Those words could be from the Prothean language!"

"And the damn thing blew up." Jayce dropped her head into her hand with a groan, massaging the bridge of her nose between thumb and forefinger. "Doc, am I good to go? This report is going to take me a while to write up."

"As long as paperwork is all you do, I'll release you," the doctor agreed, "but I want to see you after the night cycle for a final brain scan. I'll include your dream in my report, do some research on - hello, Captain Anderson."

Shepard slid from the bed to stand at attention, the other two lining up beside her as the captain strolled in. "At ease," Anderson told them before addressing Dr. Chakwas. "How are your patients holding up?"

"I'm kicking them all out," the doctor replied, "on the condition that they each return for a final checkup before being cleared for full duty."

"Good." The captain nodded in satisfaction. "Lieutenant Alenko, Chief Williams, get some rest. We've got just under fourteen hours before we arrive at the Citadel. Commander, I'd like to speak with you in private."

Jayce accepted this with a nod. Neither of the two junior officers looked happy, but they followed as Dr. Chakwas led them out of the medbay.

"They're not going to try to pin that clusterf- that mess on the commander, are they?" Ashley demanded after the door slid shut behind them.

"Captain Anderson's not like that," Kaidan assured her, though he looked more than a little worried himself.

"He's right, Chief Williams," the doctor agreed. "The captain won't let Commander Shepard be hung out to dry for someone else's errors, but they're both likely going to wind up testifying before the Citadel Council. As such, a debriefing is definitely in order beforehand."

"If you say so, Doctor," Ashley replied, but both of them settled in at a table in the mess, watching the medbay doors. Dr. Chakwas watched them for a moment, a faint smile touching her lips, then went to instruct the mess sergeant to bring them some dinner.

OOO

Anderson waited until the medbay doors slid closed before addressing his XO again. "All right, no bluffing: how are you? That beacon hit you hard." Hard enough that he'd been worried about what he might have to tell Mike and Hannah.

Jayce shook her head. "I'm fine, sir. Really. My head still hurts a bit, but that's all." She hesitated, then went on. "How bad is it?"

He didn't need to ask what she was talking about. "I'm not going to lie to you: it's not good. A Council Spectre is dead, the beacon destroyed and the geth are attacking. The Council is going to want answers."

"I wouldn't mind a few myself," she countered, an edge in her voice. "Sir, we walked into that one blind. Intel dropped the ball, big time."

Friction between Intelligence and Operations was as old as the coexistence of the two branches. Anderson had been on Jayce's side of the gap often enough, but this time, he had to disagree. "Commander, the geth haven't been seen outside the Perseus Veil in two hundred years," he told her. "There was no way anyone could have predicted that attack."

"Maybe not," Jayce replied, "but how did they even know about the beacon's discovery? It wasn't exactly common knowledge."

"Unfortunately, that's fairly easy to answer," he said ruefully. "As a Spectre, Saren has top security clearance with any government in Citadel space. It would have been easy for him to discover the beacon's existence and location. Hell, the Council may have even told him about it, assigned him as backup."

"Without telling Nihlus, or us." She snorted humorlessly. "If they did, they'll never admit it. I didn't even see him," she admitted. "All I've got is the word of a smuggler." She ran her fingers through her hair with a frustrated hiss. "And no idea why a turian Spectre would ally himself with the geth."

"Saren hates humanity," Anderson replied, feeling the old anger sparking in his chest. "Always has. He thinks our species is a blight on the galaxy."

Jayce gave him a questioning look, and he realized with chagrin that he had allowed his emotions to color his response. Twenty years on, and the bastard was still under his skin. "But the geth have no history of animosity toward humans," he went on, forcing himself to focus on the situation at hand, the facts that were known. "The beacon has to be the reason for the attack. The timing can't be a coincidence."

"Why didn't he take it, then?" Shepard wondered. "He had enough geth to move it, and he'd slowed us down enough that he'd have had the time."

"Maybe he had already gotten what he wanted from it," Anderson suggested thoughtfully. "The scientists I've spoken to believe that the beacons are designed to transmit information directly into the mind." He caught the flicker of recognition in his XO's eyes. "Commander, did you observe anything that might give us an idea of why he would be interested in the beacon, why he might have left it behind? Anything, no matter how small."

Jayce nodded slowly. "Just before I blacked out, I had a – a vision, I guess. I saw machines...geth, maybe, killing an organic race. Slaughtering them."

"Quarians?"

She started to shake her head, paused. "I don't know. Maybe? They weren't wearing those suits, but they didn't start using those until after their Exile, right? I couldn't really see them clearly; all I know is that they weren't humans, and they were dying. And I heard a voice, a phrase repeated over and over."

"What was it saying?"

"I – hang on." She turned to the medbay computer terminal, and a moment later, her voice came over the speakers.

He listened, fascinated in spite of the grimness of the situation. "Is that Prothean? What does it mean?"

"I don't know, sir," she replied regretfully. "If it is from the beacon, it's reasonable to conclude that the language is Prothean. Dr. Chakwas said that I was repeating the words when I first started coming around." She shrugged, looking uncomfortable. "I don't remember that, sir, but I do remember hearing the words in my dream. It...felt like a warning."

"But a warning of what?" He lifted a hand to settle her, seeing the frustration building on her face. "You did all that you could, Commander. We'll need to report this to the Council."

"What are we going to tell them?" she asked, looking dubious. "That I had a bad dream?"

"They need to know, but you need to be ready. They won't be happy to hear what you have to say about Saren. Or Nihlus' death." He paused, decided against trying to ease into it. "You were ordered to make aiding survivors secondary to reaching the beacon. If you hadn't delayed to assist Chief Williams, it's possible that Nihlus might still be alive, or at the very least, you might have been able to observe Saren firsthand."

Shepard's chin jerked up, jaw set and eyes flashing. "And Williams would have been dead. With all due respect, sir, Nihlus made the choice to go it alone. Jenkins died because he didn't think it was important to warn us about the flying drones. We were sent into a fight blind, outnumbered and outgunned. If I hadn't picked up Ashley, we might not have even made it to the beacon ourselves. She's a damn good fighter, she provided valuable intel on our opponents, and she knows how to work as part of a team, which was more than I could say for Nihlus. I stand by my decision, sir."

"So will I, Commander," he assured her firmly, "but you're going to face even harder questions from the Council, and I needed to see how you were going to respond. Just stick to the facts."

"The facts are that one of their Spectres killed another and came within seconds of turning that colony into a smoking hole in the ground," Jayce growled, then sighed. "Just getting it out of my system, Captain. I know how to talk to the brass; I'll be good. We keeping Chief Williams, then?"

"For now," Anderson replied. "The Alliance sent in troops to reinforce the surviving forces on Eden Prime, but the 212 was wiped out completely, apart from Williams. I figured she'd benefit from the change of location. I'm getting some resistance from above at making the reassignment official, however."

"Why?" Shepard asked with a frown that deepened into an incredulous scowl when he told her. "You've got to be kidding me! They're holding her back because of her grandfather?"

"That's the long and short of it," he admitted ruefully. "There are official sounding excuses, of course, but her jacket shows nothing but outstanding performance reviews and backwater colony garrison details."

"Permission to speak freely, sir?" she asked, barely waiting for the nod she knew would be coming before she continued. "That's bullshit. I've heard about Shianxi from both of my parents, read the reports myself. General Williams was fighting against a technologically and numerically superior force. He kept the turians focused on the main settlement, gave the civilians time to escape into the outlying areas, then surrendered the garrison when the Alliance failed to send reinforcements, rather than sacrifice the men and women under his command in a fight they couldn't hope to win. He was a hero who got screwed to cover up the asses of some bungling bureaucrats, and they've been denying the Alliance the service of a damn good Marine because of that? I've seen Chief Williams fight, sir. She survived the slaughter of the rest of her unit, and _not_ by being thrown out of harm's way."

"Lieutenant Alenko agrees with your appraisal of her performance," Anderson replied, knowing better than to counter Shepard's offhanded dismissal of her own survival on Akuze. "I'm considering recommending them both for citations for valor."

Shepard was shaking her head before he'd completed the last sentence. "Not for Eden Prime. No matter what the medal is, all she'll see it for is surviving when all her friends died. Trust me on this, sir." Jayce had earned a number of medals in her career, but there was one that Anderson knew that she refused to wear. "And Kaidan wouldn't feel right accepting a citation that Ash isn't getting. Just give her the chance to prove herself, and she'll earn plenty of medals that won't get stuck away in a drawer."

"Noted, Commander," the Captain conceded. "She made quite an impression on you."

"They both did," Shepard replied emphatically. "I wouldn't have made it down there without them. The Lieutenant's control of his biotics is excellent, and his weapons skills are well above what I've seen from other L2's. Give me a squad with Williams and Alenko on it, and we'll take or hold any objective that you give us, sir."

"Also noted." Anderson began mentally gearing up for a fight that he intended to win. Jayce took care of the people under her command, but she didn't dole out undeserved praise. Every instinct he had told him that the events on Eden Prime were only the first shots fired in a much larger conflict, and having a solid core team on the Normandy was an advantage that he could not afford to surrender.


	5. A Toast To The Fallen

_**Author's note**__ – Very dialog heavy chapter ahead. I just brought the characters together and let them go where they wanted. I did work some dialog from the game in here and there, but overall, I found the initial exchanges with Ash & Kaidan to be fairly stilted and clumsy in terms of flow._

_OOO_

"You all right?"

Ashley Williams looked up from the half-eaten plate of spaghetti that she had been toying with – a dozen different postings, and every damn mess hall served up the identical mix of ketchup and noodles with mystery meat - with into the concerned, hazel eyes of Kaidan Alenko.

"Yeah, I'm fine," she said, the words coming without thought. She had to be fine, and so she was. It was as simple as that. "It's just -" She broke off as the things she was trying not to think about until she was alone somewhere tried to force their way to the front. Donkey. Bates. Nirali. Rasputin. Pennyloafer. Laughter and camaraderie. Gunfire and screams. And silence...the shattering silence of a comm channel that only seconds earlier had been filled with familiar voices raised in panic, confusion, anger. The unnerving silence of foes that didn't breathe, didn't cry out when they were hit, didn't shout threats or taunts as they advanced relentlessly, their only sounds coming from the report of their weapons. Silence, except for her footsteps on the ground and her own ragged breath in her ears as she ran for her life.

The Lieutenant's expression grew chagrined. "That was a stupid question," he said softly. "I wish we'd gotten there sooner."

"So do I," she replied, as honest an answer as she'd ever given. Shepard's steady leadership and Alenko's biotics would have given Dog Squad back the edge they'd lost in the ambush, saved lives. She shook her head, pushing the what-ifs back below the surface until she could take them out and take them on without gently worried eyes watching her.

"What's taking so long, anyway?" she asked, jerking her head toward the medical bay doors. Despite the assurances from Kaidan and the doc, she wasn't relaxing. Commander Shepard might have saved her life, but she knew well enough that the ass of one blacklisted gunnery chief wasn't much in the balance, compared to what had been lost. Knew even better that when things went to hell, it was the ones closest to the action that would catch the blame, regardless of the screwed-up orders that had put them there.

She'd been dealing with the Williams curse all her life, watching her father beat against the cold walls of a military that didn't want him, then signing up for the same uphill fight the day she'd graduated high school. She'd taken a grim sort of pride in it: doing her damnedest, leaving the best in the dust, reading the halfassed excuses why her request for a shipboard detail was being denied again and she was being assigned to a colony at the ass-end of the galaxy. Now, though, for the first time since Shianxi, the Williams curse came with a body count, and maybe the Alliance brass had been right, after all. Maybe they had seen what she was too stubborn to acknowledge, because when things had gotten real, when she had been shooting at something besides targets on a range and lives had been on the line, her best hadn't been anywhere near good enough.

"Hey." A warm hand covered hers, and when she looked up, she realized that Lieutenant Alenko was more than a little blurry around the edges. "It's not your fault. The geth and this Saren, whoever he is, are the ones that killed your unit, and we're going to make them pay for it."

"You really think the Council is gonna let us do that?" She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, unsure what was more frustrating: the fact that she'd been caught all but crying, the fact that her thoughts had been so readily evident to Kaidan or the fact that she desperately wanted to believe what he was telling her. "Just turn one of their Spectres over to us? We didn't even see him! The only evidence we've got is the word of that creep, Powell." Just saying the bastard's name had her trigger finger itching. What could they have done with those grenades he'd stashed away, with all the other stuff he'd undoubtedly stolen? Who else might be alive?

"It probably won't be easy," he admitted, "but I've served under Captain Anderson before. He's not going to lay down and let them walk over him. And Commander Shepard has a reputation for being tough." He glanced around cautiously, lowered his voice. "You remember hearing about Akuze?"

"Yeah." She nodded, then her eyes widened. "Shit, that was her?" She'd been a PFC when word of the slaughter on Akuze had made the rounds. It was the first time that thresher maws had been encountered by humanity, but it hadn't been the last, and the only ones who had survived subsequent attacks had been in heavily armored vehicles. She thought back to the soldier she had followed on Eden Prime; cool under fire and a crack shot, but she didn't look or act like an Amazon. How tough did you have to be to survive a thresher maw attack on foot, anyway?

The door to the medical bay slid open, and Ashley instinctively jumped to her feet as the Captain and Commander Shepard emerged, then realized that she was the only one in the mess who had done so.

"At ease, Chief," Anderson assured her with a smile that seemed genuine, though there was a hint of steel in his eyes. "Glad to see you're finding your way around. How's the food?"

"It's...familiar, sir," she said after a moment's thought. The steely look gave way to warmth, and he chuckled.

"It'll keep you on your feet and not much else," he agreed. "Right, Lieutenant?"

"Pretty much, sir," Kaidan replied. "They've gotten the nutritional content down; they just need to work on taste."

"You seemed to like it well enough," Ash couldn't resist observing, nodding toward the empty plate - his second - sitting across from her unfinished dinner.

"Biotics," he explained with a shrug and sheepish smile. "For twenty-four hours or so after I use them extensively, I eat like a horse. It's better than the energy drinks, anyway."

"All three of you have been through a lot today," Anderson said, his eyes lingering briefly on Ashley, the compassion there testing her resolve to hold off crying until she was alone. "Glad to see that the two of you had sense enough to eat. I'm counting on you to make sure our XO gets some food in her before she starts writing up her mission report."

His manner was gently teasing, and Shepard, who had remained at his shoulder in a posture of respectful attention, shot him a mock glare.

"Paybacks are hell, sir," she warned him.

He regarded her with slightly raised eyebrows. "I have heard that before, Commander, but no one has ever been able to demonstrate it to me. Good luck trying."

Ash watched him go, feeling a wistful twinge in her chest. The easy banter between the pair was a more controlled version of the rough camaraderie that had existed within Dog Squad, and suggested a level of trust and respect that she had never had with a CO. They might be impressed with her skills at first, but as soon as they figured out her family history, the walls went up, and the rest of her detail - until they figured out how to shunt her somewhere else - was spent at a cool arm's length.

"You guys are really gonna make me eat this?" Shepard asked, looking at the remains of Ashley's meal with a decided lack of enthusiasm.

"Captain's orders, Commander," Kaidan reminded her.

"Fine, fine," she grumbled, fixing Ashley with a pointed look, "but if I have to eat, so do you."

She headed for the meal dispenser, followed by Kaidan, both of them returning with plates of spaghetti and what passed for breadsticks.

"Thirds?" Ashley teased him.

"The joy of biotics," he replied wryly, looking a bit embarrassed as he dug in.

"That's the only explanation," Shepard murmured as she dropped into a chair beside him. "This is _not _spaghetti," she declared before delivering a forkful to her mouth and chewing with dogged determination.

Ash chuckled, taking a bite from her own plate. The banter had loosened up the knot in her stomach to the point that she didn't have to force herself to eat, though being cold definitely didn't help the taste. "You miss your mom's cooking, too?" she asked. She literally dreamed about her mother's fried chicken and apple pie.

"Mine's not much for cooking," Shepard admitted. "Friend's mom. Italian." She took another bite of the faux spaghetti. "She sends me homemade lasagna sometimes," she said wistfully. "And tiramisu."

"Tira-what?" Kaidan looked perplexed, but Ashley groaned.

"Commander, I will follow you on another geth invasion for a dinner invite when you get the next shipment."

"I'd say you've earned that already," Shepard replied. "You both have. As a matter of fact, dinner's on me when we get to the Citadel. Last time I was there, there was a guy just in from Earth who was going to try to open a pizza place in one of the wards. I want to see how it turned out."

"Pizza?" Kaidan was all ears. "You're kidding!"

Ashley was skeptical. "It's almost impossible to get decent ingredients brought in. I've had some pretty sad attempts before. Made this stuff look good by comparison." She gestured at the few bites remaining on her plate, then scooped up a bit more, since it looked as though Shepard was going to be good and finish hers.

The Commander nodded. "His family's been running a pizzeria in Chicago for five generations. He's going to have his brother ship him the stuff from Earth."

Ashley pursed her lips in a low whistle. That definitely sounded promising, but - "That's going to be pricey," she warned.

Shepard nodded. "Yeah, that's why it's my treat," she said, then shrugged. "I helped the guy deal with some thugs looking to force him into a protection racket. He promised me Earth prices whenever I came in."

"Pepperoni, sausage and mushrooms." Kaidan's eyes had taken on a dreamy cast. "Jenkins and I were just talking -" His reminiscing cut off abruptly as reality did what looked to be a full body slam on his awareness. "Hard to believe he's gone," he murmured, shaking his head slowly.

"He was a good soldier," Shepard said quietly, laying a hand on his shoulder, grey eyes shifting from him to Ashley as she added, "They all were."

Ash nodded, swallowing against the tightness in her throat. Part of her was trying to feel guilty at sitting here talking about food, but at the same time, there had been a reassuring familiarity to the discussion. Food, either the low quality of military rations or the yearning for favorites from home, had been an all too regular topic of conversation in the barracks wherever she'd been. She could all but hear Rasputin bragging about his grandmother's cinnamon rolls, Nirali talking about the restaurant she planned to open up with her husband after her service was up.

_Never gonna happen now._

_"_Commander, how did you handle it?" she asked quietly. "After Akuze, I mean." She could feel Kaidan's eyes boring into her, but hell, it wasn't as though the information he'd told her was classified.

Shepard didn't reply right away, just finished the last few bites on her plate in silence, and Ashley was beginning to fear that she had indeed overstepped, but when the Commander stood and picked up her tray, she said, "Come on," tipping her head in the direction of the officers' quarters. Ash followed, Kaidan beside her, dropping their trays on the conveyor on the way out of the mess and watching curiously as Shepard snagged a couple of coffee mugs in passing. What she'd seen of the Normandy's crew accommodations thus far seemed almost unbelievably cramped, compared to the barracks of planetside garrisons. Ten cubic meters a person, and half the crew hot-bunked, sharing bunk space with a crewmate assigned to the opposite shift, one sleeping while the other worked.

The XO rated about twice the space given to the grunts, judging from the tiny cabin that Shepard led them to. A neatly made bunk, desk with computer terminal and chair looked to be all that it had come with, but a few personal touches were visible. Pictures on the wall, half a dozen books - _real _books - arranged neatly on the desk.

And the cat.

Ash initially mistook it for an oddly shaped pillow on the bed until it raised its head. A single eye slipped open, emerald green against black fur. The place where the other eye should have been was a blank expanse of white fur, notably shorter than the pelt on the other side of the face. Only one ear, too, with a gnarled nub perched atop the left side of the skull. As the door slid shut behind them, the cat rose and stretched with lazy deliberation, displaying a body that was the same erratic patchwork of long and short, black and white.

It jumped from the bed and sauntered straight to her, rubbing its head against her shin while a rumbling purr rose up. Ashley bent to scratch the scarred head and the purring got louder, filling the small room.

Shepard watched the interaction, seeming unsurprised that the cat had chosen to approach Ashley. "Meet the other survivor of Akuze," she said, setting the mugs on the desk. "Macavity – Mac for short: the toughest cat in the galaxy."

Ashley looked up in surprise, but it was Kaidan who spoke. "He was on Akuze? Seriously?"

"Yep," Shepard confirmed. "One of the colonists must have smuggled in a pregnant cat. The mother and the rest of the litter died in the first attack. One of the marines in my platoon found him in the wreckage, half starved and covered in acid burns. Took him back to camp, cleaned him up." She shrugged, her eyes distant. "I found him during the attack, stuck him in my utility pouch and somehow managed not to land on him when I got thrown into a pile of our wrecked landing shuttles. He survived two thresher maw attacks before he was two weeks old; that puts him at least one ahead of most of the rest of the galaxy."

"What about you?" Kaidan asked, crouching and scratching beneath a furry chin. Mac accepted the attention as due tribute, lifting his head slightly to allow better access, displaying a decidedly undershot jaw and jutting lower teeth.

"I've run into maws since then," Shepard admitted. "N7 ops can put you into some hairy situations, but I was in a Grizzly or Mako for those. Makes for a lot more even fight."

But far from a guaranteed win. Ash had seen reports of armored vehicles being taken out by thresher maws: thrown upside down by one erupting directly beneath or seared through by acid. She wanted to ask just how many maw attacks Shepard had faced, but wasn't sure the inquiry would be a welcome one.

Instead, she focused her attention on the cat. "Macavity, huh? He looks more like a Growltiger to me."

The look of pensive remembrance faded from Shepard's face, replaced with a smile. "You know Eliot?"

"A bit," Ash replied modestly. "My dad loved poetry; he read it to me and my sisters when he was home on leave, sent us recordings of him reading when he was gone. Later, he had me record myself reading to him every time he deployed. His favorite was 'Ulysses':

"_I cannot rest from travel: I will drink  
Life to the lees; all times I have enjoy'd  
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those  
That loved me, and alone,_".

The words came to her without effort, the memories they brought bittersweet.

"Tennyson?" Shepard guessed, brow furrowed slightly in thought. She nodded.

Kaidan, on the other hand, had the look of a man finding himself in uncharted waters. "You read poetry?" he blurted.

Ash felt her eyes narrowing. "What makes that hard to believe, Lieutenant: because I'm a grunt, or because I'm a girl?"

"You might want to give careful thought to your reply, Lieutenant," Shepard added helpfully, looking amused at Kaidan's growing discomfiture.

"It's not that it's hard to believe; it's just surprising," he began, then backpedaled, a blush starting on his cheeks. "Not because you're a girl, or a grunt. You're not! A grunt, I mean. Obviously, you're a girl, but that doesn't mean that you can't like poetry-"

"I think that what the Lieutenant is trying to say is that an interest in classical literature is rare these days, regardless of vocation or gender." Shepard looked to Kaidan expectantly. "That about cover it?"

"Yeah." Kaidan nodded, his face flaming now. "Yeah, that's it exactly." The look that he threw Ashley was so pathetically pleading that she couldn't help but laugh.

"All right, I'll buy that," she told him, "But you owe the Commander for pulling your ass out of the fire."

"Not the first time today," Kaidan observed, but Shepard shook her head.

"I wouldn't have made it down there without you," she replied. "Both of you. I know it was rough today. Seeing civilians die is hard; watching your friends die is harder, and what the geth did..." She trailed off, her expression bleak. "You both did damn good jobs today; everything the Alliance trained you for and then some, but I know that's not going to make it any easier to sleep tonight." Her eyes shifted briefly to the pictures on the wall before she turned to rummage in one of the drawers of the desk.

Ashley moved to take a closer look at the pictures. One was of Shepard and a couple that must have been her parents: the man tall, broad-shouldered and blonde, with a cocky grin; the the woman with long hair a deep shade of russet, her smile more serene. Shepard looked to be several years younger, her features evocative of them both, though she most closely resembled her father; all three of them wore Alliance dress blues. Another showed Shepard and a petite, dark-haired woman standing to either side of a blonde-haired, blue eyed man who towered over them both. His arms draped easily over their shoulders, all of them laughing as they looked at the camera. All of them young...twenty, maybe, and visibly brimming with the easy confidence of youth. Had these two been among the dead on Akuze? Ash wasn't bold enough to ask. Instead, she turned her attention to the last picture: a three-masted ship, sails billowing in the wind on a blue ocean while half a dozen planes flew overhead, their contrails streaking the sky.

"What boat is that?" she asked.

"Ship," Shepard corrected her without looking up. "That's the USS Constitution: an old American naval frigate. She was launched in 1797, stayed in active service until 1881. The US Navy maintained her as a fully commissioned ship well into the twenty-first century." She glanced up at the picture, smiling fondly. "Over two hundred and fifty years as a commissioned naval vessel. No other ship even comes close. That picture was taken at her bicentennial cruise in 1997."

"You know a lot about her," Kaidan commented, studying the image.

"Military history is a hobby of mine," Shepard replied. "She's been a special interest since I found out one of my great, great – a lot of 'greats' – grandfathers served on her during the War of 1812. Able Seaman Stephen Sheppard. We dropped a 'P' somewhere along the line, apparently."

"Damn." Ashley was impressed. "And I thought I had a service legacy!"

"The line's not unbroken," Shepard said with a shrug, "but there have definitely been more soldiers and sailors than civilians. I've looked up what I can find on some of them. Not much available on Stephen, but plenty on the Constitution, and something about her just grabbed me. I'll talk your ear off about her if you give me the chance." She shrugged self-consciously. "Bit of a geek that way, I guess, but I won't subject you to any more right now."

She stood, setting a bottle of amber-colored liquid on the desk. "I drink a toast every year on the anniversary of Akuze," she began quietly. "It's a few weeks early yet, but given the circumstances, I think they'd approve." The slight nod toward the photo confirmed Ashley's suspicions. "If you want to join me, that is."

Ashley exchanged a glance with Kaidan. "We'd be honored, Commander," Kaidan spoke up for both of them.

Shepard nodded, lifting a shot glass from over the bottle cap and setting it beside the coffee mugs. Ashley cocked her head to peer at the label as the Commander poured.

"Tequila?"

"Not traditional for toasts, I know," Shepard acknowledged, "but this was our favored poison. Made for more than a few interesting memories of shore leave. Or lack of memory, in a couple of cases." She cocked an eyebrow at Kaidan. "Half a shot for you, Lieutenant. Don't even try to tell me your migraine is completely gone."

"Mostly," Kaidan replied, but he accepted the mug she passed him without protest.

Shepard gave Ashley the second mug, then picked up the shot glass, staring at the liquid within for a long moment before she spoke, her voice strong and sure as she raised the glass to the light.

"We knew them, we'll remember them, and they will not be forgotten. To our fallen comrades!"

"To our fallen comrades!" Ash and Kaidan echoed her last words, two mugs and a shot glass clinked together, and then the tequila was burning a path down Ash's throat and spreading in her gut with the memories of weekend passes and parties, brushing off advances from Donkey, holding Pennyroyal's hair out of her face while she heaved her guts into the toilet, laughing her ass off with Nirali while Bates and Rasputin tried to prove who was the better dancer. She closed her eyes, swallowed against the sudden tightness, opened them to find Shepard watching her.

"I'd better go," Kaidan said quietly. "Sleep off the last of this headache before we get to the Citadel. Commander...thanks."

Shepard nodded. "Get some rest, Kaidan. A few hours surrounded by politicians, and you'll be wishing you were back with the geth. Chief, stay a bit longer?"

"Sure, Commander." She kept her voice level, but inside, her stomach started to knot. This was it: the next verse of the same song she'd been hearing for the last nine years. Your skills are impressive, but there are currently no shipboard details available. Oh, and you let your entire damn squad get killed, too.

Shepard waited until the door slid closed behind Kaidan, then bent to pick up Mac. "You asked me how I handled what happened on Akuze," she began as the cat draped himself gracelessly in her arms and started up that rumbling purr again.

Ashley nodded nervously. "I'm sorry, Commander, I didn't mean -"

"Don't apologize," Shepard replied firmly. "If anyone has earned the right to ask that, you have." She sat down on her bunk, scooting back to lean against the wall and drawing one knee up to her chest, letting Mac stretch out on the other leg. "When we get to the Citadel, the Alliance will want you to see a psychologist." She shrugged, scratching Mac's good ear. "Maybe it will help, but if you're anything like me, you'll figure out pretty quick what they want you to say and say it, but they'll never come close to where you're really hurting, because they don't know what it's like."

Ash sank into the chair by the desk. Shepard tipped her head back against the wall, her grey eyes distant. "Some people will call you a hero, and some people will call you a coward. The first is the closest to the truth, but your gut is going to tell you that it's the others that are right, because you know that the real heroes are the ones who died there." She snorted. "Some people will even call you lucky, and those are the ones who have no fucking idea."

Ashley nodded, her mouth dry. She'd already heard that word used in whispers in the Normandy's mess. Luck is for the lonely. Donkey had said that, and God, was it true.

Shepard went on, her voice level and quiet. "You're going to be faced with the family members of your squadmates. Most of them will be crying, some of them will hug you, some of them will hate you. They'll ask how someone died, and you'll tell them they died fighting bravely. You'll tell them that, even if you didn't actually see them die, even if you know that they were gunned down trying to run from the fight, because that's the only comfort you can give those left behind. Some of them are going to want to know why you're alive and their loved one is dead, and you won't be able to give any answer that means anything, because you know that while you may have been a better soldier than some of them, there were others that were as good or better than you'll ever be."

"I was in charge," Ash confessed in a hoarse voice. "The LT made Donkey the squad leader, but they all looked to me, and I led them right into an ambush."

"The geth are made for that," Shepard replied. "No breathing, no fidgeting to give them away. No chance any of them are going to get scared and run...and absolutely no warning for any of you that that is what you were going up against. What happened on Eden Prime is not your fault, Chief."

"Did you believe that, when someone said it to you about Akuze?" Ashley challenged her.

"No," Shepard admitted with a sad smile. "Still don't, some nights, but it's true. Your squad didn't deserve to die, but neither did you, and I'm damn glad you didn't, because I'm not sure we'd have made it to the spaceport and gotten those bombs disarmed without you. You helped save a lot of lives today, Chief Williams."

"Ashley is fine, Commander. Or Ash."

Shepard nodded. "And I'm Jayce, when the brass isn't listening in."

"All right," Ash agreed, though privately she wasn't sure that she'd manage it. Respect for officers had been instilled in her long before she had enlisted.

"And if you ever need to talk – about Eden Prime or anything else – this door is always open."

"Thank you, Commander." There had been a hint of permanence in Shepard's words that she was afraid to hope for. "Do you think they'll let me stay on the Normandy?"

"Captain Anderson is requesting that you be detailed here." Shepard's words triggered a wave of elation that was quickly joined by guilt.

"Corporal Jenkins," she said quietly. "If he hadn't died, I might not be here."

Shepard sat forward abruptly, dislodging Mac, who rolled onto the bed with a grumble of protest. "I'll let you feel guilty about your squad," she growled, "but you start taking responsibility for shit you had nothing to do with, and I'll kick your ass. If Jenkins hadn't died, your performance down there would still have been exemplary, and we'd still be making room for you. This isn't a pity detail, Ash; we need good soldiers, and we found one."

"Yes, ma'am." Ash wondered if she should bring up her family history now, before they found out from Alliance brass, but she chickened out. "Thank you."

Shepard accepted that with a nod, leaning back and scruffing Mac back onto her lap, but the cat slipped from beneath her hand like water, stalking to the edge of the bed and barely pausing before leaping into Ashley's lap with an imperious mrrowr.

"You realize you've just acquired a full time job any time you set foot in here," Shepard commented, watching in amusement as the Gunnery Chief obediently began scratching.

"I don't mind," Ash replied. "We had dogs when I was growing up, at least on the colonies that allowed them. We moved once when I was seven and had to get rid of Sherman, my bulldog. I cried for a week."

"Never stayed long enough anywhere that would let me keep pets," Shepard replied. "Except for a hamster, but then Gina decided he needed to be free and he made it onto the bridge, and that was the end of Nibbles. Not sure why the brass let me keep this furball, except that it gave me something to focus on while I was recovering." She paused, then added, "Was Sherman named for the general or the tank?"

"The tank, I think," Ashley told her. "My dad named him, said it was because of the way he barreled through the house."

"Poetry and military history. Your dad sounds like an interesting guy," Shepard observed.

"He was," Ash said simply. The tense was not lost on the Commander.

"I'm sorry," she said quietly.

Ash shook her head. "It's all right. He died a few years ago. It doesn't hurt like it did." It had felt like her world had ended then, too. She had survived that; she could survive this. Shepard had. "Your parents?"

"Both alive, both military," Shepard replied. "My dad's retired, lives on Arcturus Station. Mom's the XO on the Kilimanjaro."

"Which one of them read to you?" Ashley asked, scanning the titles of the books on the desk. There was 'Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats', of course, along with The Jungle Books, The Wind In The Willows, The Hobbit, Captain Blood, and Harry Potter & The Sorcerer's Stone. Not exactly standard leisure reading material for an Alliance officer, the books were all visibly old, with signs of wear along the cloth and leather spines. They had to be childhood mementos; all but the Sabatini title were familiar to Ash from her own youth, but carting them along had to take up a big chunk of the weight allotted for personal items.

"My mother, mostly," Shepard said as Ash reached out to pull the TS Eliot from its place. "They were almost never given the same duty stations, and I stayed with my mom most of the time. Dad visited when he could, and we'd have vacations together."

There was a hint of wistful nostalgia in the words that Ash opted not to investigate. Military life was hard when only one member was in uniform; for a husband and wife, both serving, seeing each other only when leave schedules allowed...people grew apart. Crappy but true, and not really any of her business. She ran her fingers over the dust jacket carefully; it was faded, but mostly undamaged, with a few tiny tears at the edges, the cloth binding beneath similarly worn but intact. A book often read and gently cared for.

"You can borrow it, if you like," Shepard offered as she opened the cover and turned the pages, lifting it above the inquisitive sweep of Mac's paw, enthralled by the smell and feel. They had some books at home, but they were by and large too bulky for the frequent moves of a military family to keep many around, and definitely too much for the weight allotments of an NCO, so most of her reading was done on datapads. She turned to the title page, and her eyes fell on the publishing date.

"Nineteen thirty-nine?" She froze, her mind doing the math. "It's a first edition?"

"Yeah," Shepard confirmed, looking a bit amused at her reaction. "It belonged to my mother; it's been in her family for generations. It's the oldest one I've got, but some of the rest aren't too far behind. I keep a ton of books on my datapad, but those..." She shrugged. "Between them and the furball, I eat up a big chunk of my weight quota, but it's worth it. I still read them sometimes; it's like visiting old friends. Good way to relax after a day of being shot at."

Ash nodded, thinking of her father's treasured volume of English poetry. She still curled up with it in his old chair whenever she went home to visit, hearing the words in his voice, the faintest hint of his aftershave lingering with the smells of leather and old paper in a familiar melange of scent that cradled her as his arms once had. The thought of inadvertently damaging a tome that Shepard undoubtedly treasured no less was more alarming than the question of how much it would cost to replace a book that was nearly two and a half centuries old, though the answer was almost undoubtedly way beyond her pay grade. "I'd better not, but thanks." She closed the book and carefully returned it to its place.

"You obviously know how to handle books," Shepard told her. "I trust you with it."

"It's not really me I'm worried about," Ashley replied. "I'm still not sure where they've got me bunking, or who with. I don't want to risk a roommate spilling coffee on it or something."

Shepard accepted this with a nod, saying, "I've kept you from your rest long enough. Lieutenant Tanaka should know where you've been assigned; you'll find him in the CIC."

"Thanks, Commander." Ashley nudged Mac to the floor and stood. "For everything."

"You're welcome," Shepard replied. "And the offer stands, Ash: if you ever need to talk, I'm here."

"I'll remember that," Ashley promised. As the door closed behind her, she paused to get her bearings. Spotting Kaidan at a work terminal, she made her way over to him.

"I thought you were going to get some sleep?" she reminded him.

"I was...I am," he said. "Just needed to check on some things." He'd closed what he'd been viewing as she approached, but not before she'd seen the word 'Tennyson' on the screen.

She didn't mention it, saying instead, "I'm gonna crash myself as soon as I find out where my bunk is. The Commander told me to talk to Lieutenant Tanaka; how do I get to the CIC from here?"

"Follow those steps up a level," he told her, pointing the way. "Not sure why they did that instead of extending the elevator shaft, but that's the way it's set up."

"Thanks," she told him, making her way up the steps in a better frame of mind than she would have believed possible sixteen hours earlier. She still didn't anticipate getting much sleep, but the ache of loss had been tempered somewhat by the knowledge that she wasn't as alone as she had thought she was.

_OOO_

___**More Author's Notes**____ – For those who were interested, there really was an Able Seaman Stephen Sheppard in the USS Constitution's crew during the War of 1812. The toast used by Shepard is an abbreviated version of a Toast To Fallen Comrades used by the Canadian Army._


	6. Shaking Things Up

_**Endrius**__ – Mac showed up while this story was in the planning stages and, in true feline fashion, decided to stay. He'll be appearing here and there during downtime, since he has no special talents except the ability to sleep through anything and hearing a foil food packet being opened on another deck. Standard feline skills ;-)_

_**Theodur**__ – Exploring and expanding the personalities of the squad & the relationships that grow between all of them during the course of the mission was one of the big motivations for this story. ME1 didn't allow for too much dynamic between the NPC's, but it offered up enough hints to work with. Alien squadmates galore in this chapter, and yes, I expect that Chief Williams will not be amused._

_Thanks for reviewing!_

_Now for a nice long chapter from a turian POV & hopefully a different angle on events in the Citadel._

OOO

"Saren's hiding something!" Garrus told his boss heatedly. "Just give me more time! Stall them!"

"Stall the Council?" Executor Pallin fixed him with a coldly disapproving eye. "Don't be ridiculous! Your investigation is over, Garrus."

_It's barely had time to start!_ Garrus fought down the impulse to shout the words aloud as Pallin strode away. Eden Prime had been the first time the name of Saren Arterius had been tied to an undeniably illegal incident, but two days was not nearly long enough to penetrate the shroud of secrecy that cloaked Spectre activities, even when you'd been pulling together nebulous threads of rumor and suspicion for weeks before that.

He glanced at the trio of humans who had approached during the conversation. Two females and a male...he thought. Without cephalic crests, it was difficult to be certain, but their dimorphism was at least more distinct than that of the salarians. Females tended to be more slightly built, with more pronounced mammary tissue and less facial hair. He'd been wrong on a couple of memorable occasions, but these three seemed to conform to the standards of the race, and he recognized the one in the lead.

"Commander Shepard." Her dossier had been attached to the Eden Prime report, and he'd heard the name before. Citadel Security kept track of known special operations members, be they N7, STC, asari commandos or any of the other specialized military units in Citadel space. The ones who weren't prone to getting drunk and trashing bars while they were on leave could often be tapped for assistance in tight situations, and Jayce Shepard had already gained a reputation as one of the latter types. "Garrus Vakerian, C-Sec. I was in charge of the investigation into Saren."

Recalling the human custom, he stuck out his right hand. Shepard shook it, her grip strong enough to be felt without turning it into a crushing match. Grey eyes met his in calm appraisal as she replied, "You don't seem too fond of him."

"I don't trust him," Garrus answered. Neither of the other two offered to shake hands; the insignia on the collars of the Alliance dress uniforms that they all wore indicated that they were subordinate in rank to Shepard. The male's face was a study in neutrality; the other female wore a look of barely suppressed suspicion that he'd seen often enough on humans. "Unfortunately, as a Spectre, his activities are largely classified." Unlike Pallin, Garrus generally envied the Spectres the wide latitude they were given in performing their duties, but there was no denying that it was damned inconvenient when you were trying to establish any level of accountability.

"I take it that it's not common for them to go rogue, then?" Shepard wanted to know.

He shook his head "We get the occasional complaint about their methods, but that's mostly just bellyaching from the bad guys they've shut down."

"The people of Eden Prime weren't criminals!" the dark haired female observed angrily. Shepard turned to her, making a calming gesture, then faced Garrus once more.

"What have you managed to find out?"

"Damn little of use," he growled, hating the admission. "I've found records confirming his presence in the systems near the Perseus Veil in the last few weeks."

"That's where the former home world of the quarians is," the male exclaimed. "The one the geth took over."

Garrus simply regarded him in silence until he realized that the C-Sec officer was already aware of that obvious detail and shut up with an apologetic nod.

"I had a hacker friend dig up his recent extranet activity and communications," he went on. "A lot of it is encrypted, or conducted over secure frequencies, but the ones that were accessible were mostly research into the Protheans, specifically worlds which they are either known or suspected to have colonized."

"Like Eden Prime?" Shepard guessed.

Garrus nodded. "It was in there, but there was nothing in what my friend uncovered that would make it a more likely target than a hundred other worlds like it, and I have no idea how he found out about the beacon."

"Maybe it was just an attack on a human colony," the dark haired female said, but Shepard looked dubious.

"If it was just him, maybe, but where do the geth fit in?" she disagreed. "They have no history of aggression after driving the quarians from Rannoch and its nearby systems. How do they go from two centuries of seclusion to a full scale attack on a race that they've never had any contact with?"

"Maybe Saren has discovered a way to control them?" the male suggested.

"Maybe so, Lieutenant," Shepard conceded, "but if that's the case, then Eden Prime is all but guaranteed to be just the first attack." She shook her head, breath hissing in a frustrated sigh. "There are just too many damn unknowns."

"I'll keep digging," Garrus promised. "He's good at covering his tracks, but he's bound to slip up sooner or later, and when he does, I'll be waiting."

The male glanced past Garrus, toward the entrance to the Council chamber. "Commander, I think they're ready for us."

"Good luck, Shepard," Garrus offered as the trio headed for the stairs. "Maybe they'll listen to you."

"Don't get your hopes up," she warned him.

OOO

One of the few ( to Garrus' way of thinking) privileges of being an officer in C-Sec was being allowed to observe the proceedings in the Council chamber. 'Observe' being the key word; anyone fool enough to interrupt the Council or - spirits forbid - question their decisions found themselves banned and working the biggest crap details that Pallin could come up with.

In theory, Citadel Space was a federation of autonomous species cooperating to explore and settle the galaxy, but the true governing power rested with the Citadel Council. They could choose to grant a species coveted embassy space on the Citadel, giving their concerns and interests greater exposure and priority, or revoke that embassy, dropping that species to a subordinate status that was as vigorously denied as it was religiously adhered to. And to be granted a seat on the Council itself, to have an active voice in making the decisions that shaped the galaxy...good luck!

Nearly thirteen-hundred years had elapsed since the turians had been given a Council seat. In that time, countless species had pushed for inclusion, with humans being only the most recent; privately, Garrus was rooting for them, if only because they seemed likely to shake up the current status quo. They actually _did _ things, jumped in with both feet and took both the rewards and the lumps from their actions, while the other species were talking about convening a meeting to discuss whether or not the matter at hand should be given to a committee for further discussion.

On the other hand, whoever had decided that a pompous blowhard like Udina should be humanity's spokesman to the Council had not done anyone any favors.

"This is an outrage!" The human ambassador declared, glaring from the petitioners' podium, across the gap that kept the Council's exalted personages apart from the common rabble. "If a turian colony had been attacked, you would take action!"

"The turians do not establish colonies on the edge of the Terminus Systems," Councilor Sparatus replied disdainfully.

"The Alliance was aware of the risks when you entered the Traverse," Councilor Tevos added, leaving out what everyone there knew: planets at the edges of Citadel Space, near the lawless regions of the Attican Traverse and the Skyllian Verge, were all that remained available for colonization. The older species had laid claim to the best worlds centuries earlier, and even when the colonies they had established were barely-inhabited settlements, they clung tenaciously to those claims. The Krogan Rebellions had all but extinguished any inclinations toward sharing territories, and while the humans were not as aggressively expansive as the krogan, they were every bit as tenacious and considerably more innovative. Easier to let them take the risks, expand the range of Citadel Space and reap the benefits while disingenuously denying any responsibility for aid when trouble was encountered.

Tevos went on. "The geth attack _is _a matter of concern, and will be addressed; however, there is nothing to suggest that Saren was involved."

"An eyewitness saw him kill Nihlus in cold blood!" Udina exclaimed.

"An eyewitness that, by Commander Shepard's own account, was an admitted smuggler," Valern, the salarian Councilor, pointed out. "And who has since vanished without a trace. It could just as easily have been him who killed Nihlus and concocted this tale to cover his own guilt."

Garrus managed not to laugh aloud at the idea of a barefaced petty criminal getting the drop on Nihlus; Sparatus looked torn between wanting to accept the simplistic explanation and refusing to consign the memory of a turian Spectre to such an ignominious fate.

"Unfortunately, we'll never know," Saren spoke up. If the opinions of the Council toward him had needed to be made any clearer, their choice to allow him to appear as a holographic projection twenty feet tall, towering over the other attendees like a God deigning to be seen by his worshipers, was all that was needed. "Since the Alliance failed to arrest him."

"We had more pressing matters to deal with," Shepard replied calmly. "Like defusing the bombs that you left behind."

"The Citadel Security investigation has found no evidence to support your accusations of treason," Councilor Sparatus reminded her.

"No?" Shepard challenged him before turning her attention back to Saren. "The C-Sec investigation showed that you've been spending time in systems near the Perseus Veil, and researching worlds colonized by the Protheans, including Eden Prime. What were you doing?"

"My job!" Saren snapped, and Garrus fought down the urge to utter a whoop. The arrogant bastard was so accustomed to being allowed to do what he wanted without question that he hadn't even bothered to deny his activities. Garrus didn't miss the brief glances that passed between the Councilors, and neither did Saren.

"I am insulted by these accusations and insinuations!" he proclaimed loudly. "Nihlus was a colleague and a friend!"

"That just let you get the drop on him!" a man that Garrus recognized as Captain David Anderson shouted.

Saren's cold gaze fixed on the human. "Captain Anderson. Still trying to blame me for your own failures?"

What was this? Garrus filed it away for later. Spectre files were classified, but those of Alliance personnel were generally not nearly so secure. If Saren and Anderson had clashed in the past, he might be able to find evidence of it in the human's records.

Saren went on, venom barely glossed over in his voice. "If you are looking for the one responsible, I suggest you start with your protegee. She is the one who allowed the beacon to be destroyed."

Shepard didn't take the bait. "You seem to know a lot about a mission that was supposed to be top secret," she remarked, crossing her arms and staring up at him.

"As a senior Spectre operative, I received Nihlus' files after his death." Saren's focus had shifted from Anderson to Shepard. "I read your report; I was not impressed, Commander." His mandibles twitched in a gesture of contempt. "But it was nothing that I wouldn't have expected from a human."

Again, Shepard refused to be goaded. "Seems like you've got a grudge of your own against humanity," she observed. "But I don't think that's the only reason you targeted Eden Prime. What did you get from the beacon that was worth leaving it behind and destroying it?" She was trying to push him into another slip, but he was on his guard now

"Your species needs to learn its place, Shepard," he informed her haughtily. "You're not ready for a seat on the Council. You're not even ready to become a Spectre."

"That's not your choice!" Udina burst out, swallowing the bait that Shepard was ignoring. "That is not his decision!" he appealed to the Council.

"Commander Shepard's admission to the Spectres is not the purpose of this meeting," Councilor Tevos agreed. So Shepard was a potential Spectre? That added still another angle to events. Saren's antipathy toward humanity was well known; just how far would he go to prevent their advancement? How far would the Council let him go?

"This meeting has no purpose!" Saren asserted, now firmly back on the offensive. "The humans are wasting your time...and mine."

Another glance passed between the Councilors, and each of them typed briefly at their personal terminals before Tevos spoke again. "This Council has found no evidence of a connection between Saren and the geth, or any indication that Saren was involved in any way on the attack on Eden Prime. Ambassador, your petition to have Saren Arterius removed from the Special Tactics and Reconnaissance division is denied."

"There is another issue that needs to be discussed," Anderson spoke up before the meeting could be dismissed. "Commander Shepard's vision; it may have been caused by the beacon."

"So I'm to be accused on the basis of dreams?" Saren demanded. "Though given her family's history of mental illness and conspiracy theories, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that her so-called 'evidence' is an hallucination."

The taunt hit home; Garrus could see it in the clenched muscles of Shepard's jaw, the angry flush to the skin of her face. "You son of a bitch," she growled, pushing past Anderson's attempt at restraint. "When you're done hiding behind the Council's skirts, look me up and we'll see who the pretender is...unless women and children are all you can handle without backup."

Saren's bellow of anger was cut off as the holographic image vanished. "This meeting is dismissed," Tevos proclaimed with a disapproving frown.

Garrus watched the humans departing the platform, then turned to leave himself and found himself facing Pallin.

"I ought to reprimand you for sharing details of your investigation with the humans," the executor growled, "but Shepard actually managed to shake up Saren a bit. If the Spectres don't take her, I may offer her a job."

"I may propose to her," Garrus quipped, turning his head to catch a last glimpse of the human. "Or proposition her, at least." She'd stood up to both Saren and the Council, keeping her cool until the end and definitely managing to score some points off of the canny bastard. "What's that he was saying about her family history?"

"You don't know?" Pallin inquired, in a tone that suggested that Garrus had missed something obvious. "Lieutenant-Commander Shepard's parents are retired General Michael Shepard and Captain Hannah Shepard."

Garrus stared at him in astonishment. "Shit, they had a kid?" Michael Shepard's exploits in the First Contact War were still studied at turian military academies as examples of unconventional small-unit tactics. Unpredictable, aggressive and canny, he'd given turian ground patrols fits on planetside sorties.

Hannah Shepard's reputation had been made when she had been thrown into command of the cruiser SSV London after the captain and his chain of succession three-deep had been obliterated by a hit to the command deck. Sealing off the breached sections and commanding from engineering, the then Staff-Lieutenant Shepard had led the turian dreadnought Icaritus on a merry chase through the Dalcor system, using the damaged cruiser's greater mobility to full effect through an asteroid belt, luring the Icaritus ever closer, then pulling a last-ditch slingshot around the tiny planet closest to the system's star, using the centrifugal momentum and a full burn on the engines to get clear while the dreadnought's greater mass hurled it out of the planet's orbit and into the star's gravitational pull.

Turian military history mentioned both humans in accounts of the First Contact War, and Garrus even recalled reading somewhere that the two were married, but it had never occurred to him that they might have children. "What was that about mental health, then?" Neither of the elder Shepards seemed a likely candidate, but their daughter's response indicated that the jab had hit home somehow.

"I'm not sure," Pallin admitted. "General Shepard has not been seen much since his retirement; it's possible he has experienced a breakdown of some sort. It's not the kind of thing the Alliance would advertise, but Spectres have access to files the general public could never see. Her response seems to indicate that there is some validity to the charge."

"She got his fringe up, too" Garrus observed.

"That she did," Pallin agreed, his mandibles flaring in satisfaction at the memory. "She got him to forget that he wasn't just talking to her, and once he realized that, he went on the defensive, trying to distract. He's left himself vulnerable somewhere." The executor's eyes fixed on Garrus with a predatory gleam. "Keep it discreet, but find it and make him choke on it."

"Gladly." He was back on the case, and Garrus felt a surge of cautious exhilaration, tempered by the knowledge that his quarry was no petty criminal or ward thug, but one of the most dangerous operatives in the galaxy, able to tap into almost unlimited resources.

He returned to his office in C-Sec and opened his files on Saren, looking for something – anything – that he might have overlooked before, knowing that the clock was ticking. If there was a loophole, Saren was going to be trying to close it.

A message popped up on his terminal. He glanced at it: Dr. Chloe Michel, a human physician who ran a clinic in the upper wards, treating human and nonhuman alike, frequently without charge. She also tended to hear things from her patients, and had given Garrus good information on criminal activity in the wards before. As he read the contents, he could feel his crest trying to rise; shit, she'd sent this over an unsecured connection. Anyone monitoring the clinic's extranet could read it.

He stood and moved swiftly to the weapons locker, leaving the Hammer in its cradle with a twinge of regret, but a sniper rifle would offer no advantages in the tight confines of the Wards. Assault rifle, pistol, shotgun: he settled them into their places on his suit harness, grabbed spare ammo cubes and heat sinks.

"Hot date?" Charles Harkin asked with a smirk as he sauntered by.

"Hot lead," Garrus countered tersely, in no mood to deal with this particular asshole right now. "Dr. Michel's clinic, Upper Wards. Tell dispatch to keep an ear open for reports from that area; I might need backup." He didn't expect an offer of assistance from Harkin, and he wasn't disappointed.

"Can't," Harkin replied, heading for the door. "Got a hot lead to check on myself."

Garrus shook his head in disgust, knowing that Harkin's 'hot lead' was on a glass of scotch at Chora's Den. The sorry bastard didn't even bother hiding it any more, but he was going to be in for a surprise; The Alliance Embassy had decided to stop covering for him now that he was no longer the only human in Citadel Security, and Pallin's crosshairs were settling right on his drunken ass.

Garrus was more than willing to wait for that particular gratification, and he had more pressing concerns to occupy his attention right now. He briefly debated taking the time to give dispatch a heads-up, decided against it; Pallin wanted the investigation continued discreetly, and there wasn't anyone that he honestly trusted for backup, anyway.

Getting to the Upper Wards was a matter of minutes on the Citadel Rapid Transit system. Once there, Garrus became a shadow, moving swiftly through the alleys that connected the main thoroughfares. Some C-Sec officers – most of them – preferred to advertise their presence as a visible deterrent to crime, but Garrus operated on the theory that if you wanted to actually _catch_ criminals in the act, it helped if they didn't know you were there.

He peered around a corner at the front of Dr. Michel's clinic. It appeared quiet at first glance, except for the broad-shouldered, unshaven human standing beside the door, arms crossed in a seemingly casual pose. Garrus watched a salarian approach and be turned away by the guy.

He backed away, headed for the rear entrance to the clinic. He normally came and went by that route, anyway; safer for Dr. Michel if it wasn't known that she was a C-Sec informant. There was another thug stationed by the back door, but there was no traffic in the shadowy area. Garrus briefly considered the pistol, decided against the noise. Instead, he stepped around the corner, striding purposefully toward the door.

"You seen a drell duct rat run by here?" he asked as he advanced, watching as the thug's initially alert posture began to relax. "Little shit stole a credit chit from a volus -" As soon as he was within reach, he struck: arms shot out, locking around the thug's neck before he could react. The struggle was brief and quiet, the end signaled by the muffled crack of a neck breaking. Briefly, the thought that he might be wrong about the situation crossed his mind, but he dismissed it. The guy had been up to no good, and combined with the sentry in the front and the message that Dr. Michel had sent, Garrus was going to go with his instincts.

He dragged the body out of sight behind some crates, then ducked through the door, moving quick and quiet through the storage room at the rear of the clinic.

"I haven't told anyone, I swear!" Dr. Michel's voice was terrified, and when Garrus peered around the edge of the door between the storage and treatment rooms, he found her surrounded by four burly humans, one of whom he recognized immediately.

"That's smart, doc," the leader, an ape named Garvey, told her, the barrel of his pistol not quite touching the underside of her chin. "Now, if Garrus comes around, you stay smart, understood?"

Garvey was one of the lackeys for Fist, the head of most of the organized crime on the Citadel, which confirmed one of the rumors that Garrus had picked up...which also meant that on top of the chance to nail Saren, he just might bring down one of C-Sec's most wanted. Today might not be such a bad day, after all. Now, he just needed to get these bastards away from the good doctor. He drew his pistol, consulting the readouts on his targeting visor; he could take out two, maybe three, but not all four of them fast enough to eliminate the risk that one of them could take out Michel.

"Who are you?" For an instant, Garrus thought he'd been discovered, but Garvey's eyes were turned toward the front door, and he pulled Dr. Michel in front of him, putting the barrel of his pistol to her temple...and offering his own head up in a perfect profile from the side.

He never saw Garrus lean out and take the shot; his head jerked, blood and bone spraying onto Dr. Michel and the rest of the thugs, but the hand holding the pistol released its grip, and when he collapsed, the doctor went down with him, removing her from the line of fire. Garrus took out a second one before he could get his weapon out. The remaining two drew pistols, but faced with opponents on two sides, they were cut down in seconds.

Jayce Shepard stepped into view, the other two Alliance officers behind her, all of them holding their weapons ready. Their stances relaxed marginally when they recognized Garrus.

"What the hell was that about?" Shepard asked, eyes sweeping the room, confirming that the threat had been eliminated.

"Just a little pest control," Garrus replied modestly. "Nice timing, Shepard. Gave me a clear shot at that bastard." And a nice shot it had been, so he was a bit surprised at the disapproving frown that Shepard directed at him.

"You took a hell of a risk with your hostage," she informed him, holding out a hand to help Dr. Michel to her feet. "What if you'd missed?"

He blinked. "Missed? At that range?" Her expression told him that had probably not been the best response. He sighed. "I didn't have time to think about it; I just took the shot." He glanced at the physician. "Dr. Michel, are you all right?"

"I am, thanks to all of you," she replied gratefully, reaching for a handful of gauze to wipe bits and pieces of Garvey from her face.

"Why were those men threatening you?" Shepard asked her.

"They work for Fist," Dr. Michel replied. "He is a crime lord here on the Citadel. They wanted to keep me from telling Garrus about the quarian."

Shepard looked puzzled. "Quarian?"

The doctor nodded. "A few days ago, a quarian came to the clinic. She'd been shot, but she wouldn't tell me who did it, or let me inform C-Sec. She asked me about the Shadow Broker; she said she had information that she wanted to exchange for a place to hide."

"Did she tell you anything about what that information might be?" Shepard asked.

"She said that it had something to do with a Council Spectre named Saren, and..." Dr. Michel frowned, then nodded. "And the geth. That is what she said."

Garrus met Shepard's eyes, seeing his own rising interest reflected there. "If she's got something linking Saren to the geth, it could be the evidence we need to convince the Council!" he exclaimed.

Shepard nodded grimly. "And if Saren knows she has it, she's in danger. Where is she now?"

"I had an associate set her up a meeting with Fist," Dr. Michel replied. "He is an agent for the Shadow Broker."

Garrus felt his gizzard knotting. "Except that rumor has it he isn't any more; he's working for Saren now...and the Shadow Broker isn't happy about it."

"Fist double crossed the Shadow Broker?" Dr. Michel looked understandably surprised. "That's stupid, even for him. Saren must have paid him a great deal."

"I can just about guarantee that it's not enough to keep him safe from the Shadow Broker," Garrus predicted.

"You know where to find this Fist?" Shepard asked him.

"That's the easy part," he told her. "He's got an office in the back of Chora's Den, a bar in the Lower Wards."

The female soldier groaned. "That dive again?"

Shepard gave her a sympathetic grin. "We've been there already," she told Garrus. "That's how we knew to come here. One of your...colleagues is a regular there. Udina sent us to him."

"Harkin?" Why was he not surprised that he and Udina knew each other? "Do me a favor and don't call him my colleague. Anyway, finding Fist isn't going to be the hard part. Since the rumors started about him double-crossing the Shadow Broker, he's gone to ground, surrounded himself with hired muscle. We're going to have to fight our way through to him."

"We?" Shepard quirked an eyebrow at him.

"Pallin put me back on the case," he explained. "I want to bring down Saren as much as you do. I'm coming with you."

She didn't look displeased...exactly. "Joint op?" she wanted to know.

He shook his head. "My boss wants C-Sec involvement kept discreet; I don't think the Council has authorized the continuation of my investigation. I'll follow your lead, but if we're going to try to force our way into Chora's Den, there's an addition I'd recommend."

Shepard regarded him expectantly. "I'm listening."

"The Shadow Broker's hired a krogan bounty hunter, Urdnot Wrex, to take out Fist," he explained.

"We saw a krogan arguing with the guards at Chora's Den," the dark haired female put in.

"That was probably him," Garrus agreed, consulting his omni-tool. "Looks like they're detaining him at C-Sec. They haven't arrested him yet, because he hasn't broken any laws, but Fist complained about him making threats. I'd imagine they'll be quite happy to let us take him off their hands."

Shepard cocked her head, considering. "A krogan could come in handy."

"Assuming we can trust him," the other female observed with a scowl.

"Only way to find out is to talk to him," Shepard reasoned. "Welcome aboard, Vakarian. Lieutenant Kaidan Alenko, Gunnery Chief Ashley Williams," she added, gesturing to the male and female in turn as they left. "You want to send someone to arrest this guy?" she asked, nodding to a form on the floor by the front door. It was the sentry, just beginning to stir and sporting an impressive lump on the side of his skull.

"Probably should," he agreed, bending to cuff the guy's hands behind him and his ankles together, then calling for a pickup. "At least we won't be fighting him later."

Shepard stopped outside of the clinic, one hand touching the earpiece of the comm headset. "She's with me, sir," she said aloud, pausing to listen. "I'll tell her, sir." She turned to Gunnery Chief Williams. "Captain Anderson asked me to tell you that you have an appointment at the Presidium in fifteen minutes."

"Can't it wait?" Williams protested, but Shepard shook her head.

"You know it can't, Chief," she replied gently. "Don't worry; the Normandy won't be leaving without you."

They all took the CRT back to the Presidium, but Williams exited at the Embassy level, leaving the rest of them to continue to C-Sec. Shepard offered no further explanation for her departure, and Garrus didn't ask. None of his business, after all.

As he had expected, the krogan was definitely wearing out his welcome.

"Witnesses saw you making threats in Fist's bar. Stay away from him," Officer Thompson ordered the krogan.

"I don't take orders from you," Wrex growled.

Thompson tried again; dealing with krogan was a regular feature of C-Sec duty. "This is your last warning."

The krogan didn't seem impressed. "You should warn Fist. I will kill him."

Thompson let out a frustrated huff. "Damn it, do you want me to arrest you?"

The krogan's blood red eyes glittered with anticipation. "I want you to try." He turned his head, spotted them watching and immediately lumbered away from Thompson, who let him go with a "Go on, get out of here," and a glance at Garrus that said the krogan was his problem now.

The krogan stopped in front of Shepard, studying her. "Do I know you?"

His wide-set eyes were level with hers, but his hump added a good eighteen inches to his height, and his bulk added to his looming presence, but she met his gaze calmly. "The name's Shepard. I'm going after Fist, thought you might want to come along."

"Shepard? Commander Shepard? I've heard of you," he told her. "We're both warriors, Shepard, so out of respect, I'll give you a warning." He took a step closer. "I'm going to kill Fist."

_KLONK!_

Garrus felt his eyes widen, and Alenko's eyes were like saucers. _Did she just..._

Wrex stared at Shepard in astonishment. Her headbutt hadn't even rocked him backward, and it was damn sure it had hurt her forehead more than it had his frontal plate, but she showed no sign of discomfort, stepping in until they were nose to nose.

"I'm asking you because we've got a better chance if we work together," she growled at him. "I need Fist alive. What you do with him after I get what I need is between you and C-Sec, but if you damage him before that, I'll tear off your damn frontal plate and shit on what passes for your brain, am I clear?"

The krogan's expression grew thunderous, and Garrus could see C-Sec officers trying to edge into position. Abruptly, Wrex chuckled.

"You've got a quad on you, human. My people have a saying: seek the enemy of your enemy and you will find a friend."

He stuck out a massive hand, and she took it, saying, "An ally, at least, but I think we'll get along just fine, Wrex."

He grinned at her. "Let's go. I'd hate to keep Fist waiting."

As he barreled past, barely glancing at the rest of them, Garrus leaned toward Shepard. "I see you've worked with krogan before."

She shrugged. "Enough to know that saying 'please' generally doesn't impress them." She glanced ahead, making sure that Wrex was looking the other way, then gestured toward her forehead. "Bruise?" she asked in a low voice.

"Red spot," he assured her with a grin.

Blasting their way through the defensive forces at Chora's Den turned out to be almost ridiculously easy. Both Alenko and Wrex had biotic abilities in addition to weapons training, giving them a significant advantage over Fist's hired thugs. Shepard was a damn shadow, moving smoothly in and out of cover, firing with lethal accuracy, then closing to contact distance, her hands and feet only slightly less deadly than her guns. By the time they had waded through the dead bodies to the back room access, the only ones in their way were warehouse workers who had been handed guns at the last moment, and who proved remarkably receptive to being advised to seek work elsewhere. The head man himself seemed to be considering an alternate career.

"Don't kill me! I surrender!" he cried out as the four of them advanced on him relentlessly.

Shepard didn't bother trying to hide her disgust for the man cowering on the floor. "Where's the quarian?" she asked him.

"I don't know, I swear!"

Her expression went flat. "Wrong answer," she told him, bringing up her pistol.

"Wait! Wait!" The acrid smell of piss rose up. "I...I don't know where she is, but I know where you can find her!" Seeing that that highly questionable logic wasn't winning him any points, he hastened to explain. "She wanted to see the Shadow Broker, said she wouldn't meet with anyone but him...so I set up a meeting."

"Impossible," Wrex growled. "The Shadow Broker doesn't meet with anyone in person."

"And you knew that, didn't you?" Shepard's voice had gone dangerously quiet. The pistol never wavered.

"Yeah, I knew it," Fist admitted, "but she didn't." He swallowed hard. "There's a meeting taking place in fifteen minutes, but it'll be Saren's men waiting when she shows up."

One word, grey eyes cold as ice. "Where?"

"Here in the wards, one of the alleys behind the markets!" Fist said, trembling fingers calling up the location on his omni-tool, transferring it to Shepard's. "You can make it if you hurry!"

Shepard turned to go; Wrex asked, "You done with him?"

"Yep," she replied without breaking stride. Garrus followed, Alenko close behind as Fist's pleadings were cut off by a single pistol shot. A moment later, the krogan caught up with them.

"Hate to leave a job half done," he remarked. Alenko gave him a wary glance and moved ahead. Garrus couldn't hear the words he exchanged with Shepard, but the expressions on their faces indicated that "Good job" weren't among them.

"Enough, Lieutanant!" she said sharply as they entered the maze of alleys behind the markets, stopping and turning to face him. "If you don't agree with my methods, you're free to return to the Normandy, but we have a job to do right now. Are you with us or not?"

He drew himself up, looking as though he couldn't decide whether to be ashamed or angry. "I'm with you, Commander," he said, his voice strong.

She held his gaze for a moment longer, nodded once, then moved forward, eyes on her omni-tool. A sudden explosion quickened her stride into a sprint, and they burst into an alley to see a quarian running for cover while a turian and a pair of salarians were scrambling to their feet in the aftermath of what looked like a proximity mine.

_Smart girl_, Garrus thought approvingly, bringing his pistol up and sighting in on the turian, only to have the weapon start smoking in his hands as one of the damn salarians used a sabotage field. Apparently, it hit Shepard's weapon, too. Just as apparently, she didn't give a damn. Dropping the gun, she closed with them, reaching the turian first. A blur of hands and a cracking noise and he was on the ground, his head lolling at a lethal angle on his neck. She spun away, plucking the pistol deftly from his hands as he was falling and turning it on the two salarians before they could deploy another field.

_Damn._ Impressed in spite of himself, Garrus holstered his pistol. The fight had been over and done with in ten seconds. He wondered if she'd be interested in sparring later.

The quarian emerged from behind the crates where she'd hidden, approaching Shepard with a wariness that was obvious, despite her face being hidden behind the smoky glass of her helmet's visor. "Fist set me up!" she exclaimed angrily, the speakers in her mask giving her voice a slight resonance. "I knew I couldn't trust him!"

"Are you all right?" Shepard asked, looking her over. Like other quarians Garrus had seen, this one was petite...several inches shorter than Shepard, but with very nice curves that were shown to good effect by her form-fitting enviro-suit.

"I know how to look after myself," the quarian replied defensively, then, seeming to realize that she'd overreacted to the question, added, "not that I don't appreciate the help. Who are you?"

"Lieutenant-Commander Jayce Shepard, Systems Alliance," Shepard replied. "Dr. Michel told us that you have information on Saren Arterius, miss...?" She left it hanging?

"Miss?" The quarian cocked her head in puzzlement.

"The Commander is asking your name," Garrus translated helpfully.

"Oh! My name is Tali'Zorah nar Rayya, and I do have information about this Saren. I tried to give it to C-Sec, but they wouldn't listen to me, and I was told there was a seven-month wait for an audience with the Council. I tried to get into contact with the Shadow Broker, but...well, you saw how that turned out. Can you do something with it, or get me in to see the Council?"

"It's going to depend on what it is," Shepard told her, "but with Saren as eager to get his hands on it as he seems to be, I'm thinking the Council will want to see it. Dr. Michel said you'd been shot?"

"That's healing up," Tali'Zorah assured her, sounding surprised by the question, "but if you hadn't come along, I'd probably be needing her services again. Hopefully this data will let me repay you for your help...but we should go someplace safer."

"Good point," Garrus agreed. Saren wouldn't be stupid enough to come after the girl himself, anyway. "Your ambassador will want to see this," he told Shepard.

"I know," she replied with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. She glanced at the bodies on the ground, then back the way they had come from, and her expression brightened a bit. "On the other hand, if he's been monitoring the news, there's a good chance he's had an aneurysm."

No such luck as it turned out, though not for lack of trying.

"You're not making this easy for me, Shepard!" he fumed as they entered the embassy. "Firefights in the wards, an all-out assault on Chora's Den! And now..." His eyes shifted from Garrus to Wrex to Tali'Zorah. "What are you up to now?"

"Making your day, Ambassador," Shepard replied, regarding him with no more affection than he had shown her. "Or don't you want evidence of Saren's betrayal?"

"You have something?" Udina demanded eagerly, his features creasing into a frown when Shepard nodded toward Tali'Zorah. "From a quarian? What are you doing away from the flotilla?"

Tali'Zorah seemed taken aback by the brusque query and looked toward Shepard, who gave her a nod of encouragement. "I am on my Pilgrimage." She glanced around and, seeing the confusion on the faces of the humans, went on to explain the quarian rite of passage. Shepard paid attention, asked questions, while Udina waited with visible impatience.

"During my travels, I began to hear rumors of geth," she went on. "Since they exiled my people from our homeworld, they have not been seen beyond the Veil. I was curious, so I tracked a geth patrol to an uncharted world."

"Alone?" Alenko said with surprise. Garrus couldn't blame him. Tailing a bunch of geth alone would take no small amount of skill and titanium plated balls, to boot.

Tali'Zorah nodded. "I waited for one to become separated from the others, then disabled it and retrieved its memory core."

Captain Anderson had been listening patiently. Now he spoke up. "I thought that the geth automatically fried their memory cores when they were destroyed. Some kind of defense mechanism?"

"They do," the quarian agreed, "but my people created the geth. If you're very fast, very good and very lucky, you can salvage some of the data." She shrugged. "I was lucky. Most of the drive was wiped clean, but I managed to save some data, including this from the audio banks." She activated her omni-tool, and seconds later, a very familiar voice was heard:

"_Eden Prime was a major victory. The beacon brings us one step closer to the Conduit."_

"That's Saren's voice!" Anderson exclaimed. "This proves he was involved in the attack!"

"The authenticity of the data will need to be confirmed," Udina intoned pompously, "but the evidence does seem clear."

"What is the Conduit he's talking about?" Shepard wondered.

"It must have something to do with the beacon," Anderson reasoned. "Maybe it's some kind of Prothean technology...like a weapon!"

"There's more," Tali'Zorah said, activating her omni-tool again. Saren spoke again, this time followed by a feminine voice:

"_And one step closer to the return of the Reapers."_

"I don't recognize that voice," Udina said with a scowl.

"Neither do I," Anderson agreed. "What are the Reapers? It sounds ominous."

"According to what I found on the memory core, the Reapers were a hyper-advanced race of machines that existed fifty-thousand years ago," Tali'Zorah explained. "They hunted the Protheans to extinction, and then they vanished. At least, that is what the geth believe."

Udina was openly skeptical. "That sounds a bit far fetched."

"Maybe not," Shepard said slowly, looking at Anderson. "Sir, that vision I had: synthetics slaughtering organics. That could have been the Reapers killing the Protheans!"

"The geth seem to revere the Reapers as gods, the pinnacle of non-organic life," Tali'Zorah went on. "They believe that Saren knows how to bring the Reapers back."

"That at least explains why they're working with him," Shepard said thoughtfully.

For a man who had just been given what he said he'd wanted, Udina bore a remarkable resemblance to someone in the grip of severe indigestion. "The Council is going to love this," he groaned.

Shepard seemed unconcerned. "The Reapers may or may not be real, but those files do prove that Saren is working with the geth and was behind the attack on Eden Prime."

"She's right," Garrus agreed, suddenly worried that Udina might decide to back out. "Saren's treachery is what the Council needs to know about. We can sort out where the Reapers fit in later."

Udina nodded, making a visible effort to look decisive. "Captain Anderson and I will prepare the Council," he announced. "Bring the quarian -"

"My name is Tali!" Tali'Zorah said in exasperation.

"Tali, then," Udina corrected himself, not bothering to look apologetic. "Bring Tali and the – Officer Vakarian. Leave this one." He jabbed a finger toward Wrex. "The less said about what happened in Chora's Den, the better."

"That pyjak's your ambassador?" Wrex rumbled after Udina and Anderson had left.

"I didn't pick him for the job," Shepard replied with a shrug, "but he is the Alliance ambassador." She glanced at Tali. "You ready for this?"

The girl who had stalked a geth patrol looked nervous (though it was admittedly hard to be sure without seeing her face), but squared her shoulders gamely. "I am," she announced.

Shepard gave her an encouraging smile that became significantly more predatory as her eyes met those of Garrus. "All right, then. Let's go shake things up and see what falls out."


	7. Two Mothers

_**Wolfman-053**__ – What can I say? She comes by it honestly. I'll definitely be exploring Jayce's family ties more than we were allowed to in-game._

_**Theodur**__ – Providing a different perspective to events we've all experienced umpteen times was my goal, and Garrus seemed like a good choice for an alternate POV, since he's there for most of it. I took Ash along on the Chora's Den assault instead of Wrex on my latest playthrough & let Fist run...I'm interested to see how my first chat with Wrex on the Normandy goes now. Therum is definitely Jayce's first planned stop, but I've got probably three more chapters to go until we get there, including this one._

_**Reklar**__ – Good to see you again, and glad you're liking my foray into the world of Mass Effect. I have to agree with you; the character-driven plots of these games beats even the Dragon Age series. I've tried playing Skyrim, and the sheer scale of the open-world environment is impressive, but the NPC characterizations are so limited and shallow that I just lose interest. This will definitely be a long-haul project, particularly since I'm hitting the point in the reboot of What Matters The Most that I'm going to need to start writing new chapters, but glad to have you along for the ride!_

_Thanks for reviewing!_

OOO

The skies around Eden Prime buzzed with activity. Late to the party, the Seventh Fleet was all the more eager to dance. Wolf packs of frigates prowled the reaches of the Utopia system and its near neighbors in the Exodus cluster, seeking a partner that seemed to be long fled. Closer in, cruisers formed a protective net around the colony world while simultaneously serving as bases from which emergency supplies could be delivered planetside, along with specialists to repair the catastrophically damaged infrastructure of the colony: communications, power, water...all had been devastated in the attack, and the healthcare system had been overwhelmed by the surge in casualties. The worst injuries were taken aboard the cruisers for treatment in Alliance medical bays: well equipped to handle physical combat trauma, less prepared for treating psychological trauma in civilians who had unexpectedly found themselves on the front lines.

Still further offworld, the flagship of the fleet, the SSV Kilimanjaro maintained a high orbit, shadowed by the carrier SSV Sagan. If an enemy showed itself, the dreadnought's mass accelerator cannon and the carrier's fighters would be brought into deadly play, but a quarter century of experience in defending colonial settlements told the commander of the Kilimanjaro that the aggressors would not be returning.

Captain Hannah Taylor Shepard was nominally the Executive Officer of the Kilimanjaro, but Admiral Jeoffrey Barnes commanded the entire fleet from the flagship, which left his XO in charge of the dreadnought on most occasions. Even under non-combat conditions, managing the operations and population of a kilometer-long starship was akin to being mayor of a small city. When that city went into battle with its fleet, her position was more like being the brain of a bull in a China shop. A dreadnought was massive, its shields strong and its weapons devastating, but it maneuvered like a pregnant whale. Its mass alone could crush a frigate like a tin can, should a collision occur, and even a cruiser would sustain heavy damage. Likewise, the mass accelerator cannon could destroy friend, as well as foe, if it were deployed carelessly. Fortunately, the Kilimanjaro was crewed with the best: men and women that Hannah knew and trusted enough to delegate the tasks that needed delegation, all of them meshing together into a smoothly operating machine of war.

With a warrior at its heart. A warrior whose own heart was focused on a battle being fought elsewhere.

"You've got a call In the Comm Room." Hannah's gaze turned from the screens that displayed the currently benign traffic in the Utopia system to meet Staff Commander Lily Santorelli's serene brown eyes. A single nod confirmed the question she didn't ask, and an incendiary mix of worry, anticipation and a mother bear's protective rage rose in her belly. She'd been with the Alliance long enough to know that when things went as wrong as they had on Eden Prime, the brass would want someone's head to roll for it.

_Not my daughter's head, damn you. _The patrols that had let a ship as large as the images had revealed the geth vessel to be slip by unnoticed, maybe. Or whoever's loose lips had revealed the existence of the mysterious Prothean artifact that had presumably been the catalyst for the raid. From all reports, Jayce and her squad had been the reason that Eden Prime was a badly damaged colony instead of a five-klick wide hole in the ground.

And General Williams had been the reason that enough of Shianxi survived to be retaken, instead of being pounded into dust by orbiting turian dreadnoughts. That hadn't saved him.

But standing here working herself into a fury over something that only might have happened was both useless and foolish. Meeting Lily's nod with one of her own, she turned, leaving the Combat Information Center in the charge of the ranking Lieutenant Commander on duty, and headed for the Communications Room.

"Give her my love," Lily called after her.

"I will," Hannah promised. They had shared their daughters for eighteen years, then one for another six, through more than half a dozen shared details and almost as many that had them in the same region of the galaxy. In peacetime, the Alliance tried to accommodate the needs of families; officers with children were assigned duties in lower risk regions when possible, allowing the children to remain on local colonies or space stations or, much more rarely, on the ships themselves. Mike had taken a few stints with Jayce here and there, but three months of comparative peace and quiet had been all he'd ever been able to handle, and all the brass had ever been willing to grant an officer whose greatest talents lay in leading men in combat.

So Hannah remained behind, finding no small measure of fulfillment in routine patrols, colonial diplomacy, the occasional run-in with pirates or slavers – and being present to read her daughter a bedtime story on a more than occasional basis. Jayce had been five when she had first appeared with a dark-haired, dark-eyed pixie in tow, but whatever bonding had taken place had been as strong as it was instant: they'd both protested vociferously when Lily had come in search of her wayward daughter. The friendship between the mothers took longer to develop, but over the years, it had grown no less strong in its own way. The calmness that Hannah Taylor Shepard had to consciously work to maintain was as much a part of Lily as the color of her eyes. It had allowed her to survive the death of her husband in the First Contact War and the raising of a daughter who had inherited every ounce of Anthony Santorelli's vibrant and restless energy, and it was a bulwark that Hannah knew she could depend upon.

The two officers complemented each other sufficiently well that the Alliance assigned them together regularly. They'd been on the SSV Fuji – Hannah as Staff Commander, Lily as Lieutenant Commander – when word of Akuze had reached them. It had been the first and only time Hannah had seen Lily's calmness fail, shatter completely as the casualty list mounted and it became apparent that Jayce was the only survivor. Another woman might have used the absence of a body as reason to cling stubbornly to hope, but Lily was a realist; after the initial storm of grief had wracked her, she had dried her eyes, held a memorial service for Gina and then become Hannah's anchor as she waited for Jayce to emerge from her coma and dealt with Mike's tailspin from PTSD into a full blown paranoid-schizophrenic snap.

The Comm Room was empty; FTL communications were used sparingly for personal messages, but rank did have its privileges, and Hannah demanded few enough that those she did request were generally granted. She seated herself at the console, noting that the active channel was one of the secure lines, protected by encryption, and opened the link.

"Hi, Mom." Jayce showed no physical sign of injury, but the fact that the brief e-mail she'd sent the day before had specified that she was 'all right' had been a red flag that Hannah had been hard pressed not to investigate.

"Hello, dear. How are you?" Five words standing in admirable stead of the torrent of worried queries that she wanted to give voice to.

Jayce heard them all anyway. "I'm fine, Mom. I promise." At twenty-nine, she was past the age when maternal concern provoked embarrassed rebellion.

"What happened? On Eden Prime, I mean." They were still trying to assemble a coherent account of events from the colonists, but the attack had happened so fast and been so devastatingly thorough that no one left on the ground seemed to have a clear idea of what had happened. If not for a few surviving video feeds and the report from the Normandy, they wouldn't have even been able to confirm that it had been the geth who attacked.

Jayce shook her head. "Can't talk about it yet. Don't know how classified it is." Her eyes dropped. "It...was bad."

_Oh, my baby girl._ Soldiers died. Civilians too, sometimes. It was a brutal reality that anyone on the colonial frontier learned to live with, but Jayce's first lesson had been hellishly brutal, leaving her and a bedraggled kitten the only survivors of a platoon of fifty. She'd lost the squad under her command, lost the two people she'd loved the most. Either loss would have been devastating alone; the weight of them both had nearly crushed her. "We're there now," Hannah told her.

The grey eyes came up, relief washing through them. "Survivors?"

"More than they thought to find initially." And more than one with a tale of three Alliance marines who had stood between them and the attackers. "You did good."

"Not good enough." Jayce bit her lip, looking troubled. "The Council...they made me a Spectre, Mom...and I've been given command of the Normandy."

Hannah blinked. She'd known about the Spectre rumors...or suspected, anyway. It was high time that humanity was given that opportunity, and maternal pride aside, she had seen Jayce's performance reports. The rest of it, though... "Jayce, that's wonderful!" Command of a frigate – the Alliance's most advanced starship – at the age of twenty-nine was not a record, but neither was it a common achievement.

"No, it's not." Anger and frustration bubbled to the surface. "They didn't do it because they thought I deserved it. They did it so they could do something about Eden Prime without really doing anything, and -" She looked away, shame washing over her features. "Mom, they've grounded Uncle Dave."

"Bastards." David Anderson was to be the sacrificial lamb for Eden Prime then, and, despite a sliver of relief for Jayce's sake that she would not admit to anyone, Hannah was pissed. Every report she had assembled indicated that the Normandy had been dropped into a meat grinder with absolutely no warning. They had done all that was humanly possible, preventing a death count in the thousands by disarming the explosive devices left behind (something she was still doing her best not to think about too deeply). Failure – if there had been any – lay with intelligence, but that was not the way the Alliance worked. The ones on the front line took the brunt of fire from both directions.

"It wasn't just because of Eden Prime," Jayce went on. "Not even mainly that, I don't think." She chewed at her lower lip again, thinking. "Do you remember the time twenty years ago when Uncle Dave was upset about a mission, and you and Dad wouldn't tell me what had happened?" Cautious, even on a secure channel, and Hannah wondered again who might have leaked the information about the discovery on Eden Prime.

"We couldn't." Hannah remembered it all too well. David had been on the verge of leaving the Alliance altogether, not because of being denied Spectre status, though that had stung, but because of the hundreds of human lives wasted for the sole purpose of discrediting him and the turian Spectre who had walked away without so much as a reprimand. But what did that have to do with -

"Uncle Dave told me what happened," Jayce said. "That's why they pulled him out of this. The same one was responsible for what happened on Eden Prime." Grey eyes so very like Michael's held hers. "Do you understand?"

Oh, she understood, and every instinct she had was suddenly screaming at her to pull the Kilimanjaro out of orbit and position it squarely between her child and the mission she'd been given. And she couldn't. She made herself nod, her mind working furiously to fit this new and unexpected piece into the puzzle. Saren Arterius...working with the geth? "You're sure of it?"

Jayce nodded. "We have proof. Enough that the Council revoked his status. Enough that they're sending me after him."

And she was eager for the chase, hungry for payback, not a hint of fear for her own safety. _You pick the damnedest times to channel your father._ Aloud, she said, "If Captain Anderson has filled you in, then you know to be careful." Saren was ruthless and cunning, with better than two decades of experience on her daughter.

"I know," Jayce replied patiently. She'd never been wantonly reckless, but Akuze had scarred her, and the events on Eden Prime had been tailor-made to open old wounds. "I've got some leads to check out. Hopefully if I can get a clearer idea of what he's up to, the Council will be willing to commit more resources."

So there was not to be a direct confrontation just yet. Hannah breathed a silent sigh of relief and restrained herself from uttering any more words of caution. "Tell me about the Normandy," she requested. Regardless of Jayce's opinion on the motivation behind the decision, the Alliance wouldn't entrust the jewel of the fleet to someone unqualified, and she wanted her daughter to be able to take pleasure in the command her first ship.

"She's incredible, Mom," Jayce responded immediately, adding with a rueful grimace, "Unfortunately, the best things about her are classified. Captain's cabin is huge, though. Not sure what I'm going to put in it." She fidgeted, looking uncomfortable. "Still doesn't feel right."

"Anderson got screwed," Hannah agreed, "but that was not your doing, and I'm sure he'd be the first one to tell you that, if he hasn't already. You are the CO of the Normandy now, and trust me, you'll need that space of your own before this is done. How is Mac settling in?"

Jayce snorted. "He was interested for the ten minutes he took to explore. When I left, he was sacked out on my pillow."

Hannah laughed softly. "Yes, that sounds like him. Now, if you can't tell me about the ship, how about the crew?"

"Still getting a feel for them, but the Alliance crew seems good. Lost a man on Eden Prime, though: Corporal Jenkins."

"I'm sorry, Jayce." He wouldn't be the last, but her daughter knew that; no point in rubbing salt in the wound.

"It was quick, at least. He didn't suffer." Hannah had never spoken with her daughter about Akuze, but she'd read enough of the path reports to know that not all of the deaths had been quick, and she suspected that Jayce had been forced to listen to the suffering. "We brought the last survivor of the 212 on board: Ashley Williams, Gunnery Chief. She's the granddaughter of General Williams."

"Of Shianxi?" Hannah asked in surprise. When Jayce nodded, she murmured, "I didn't know he had any family still serving."

"Not surprising," Jayce replied, an edge of irritation audible in her voice as she added, "According to her jacket, she's been stuck in every shit detail between Earth and Eden Prime, never let anywhere near a starship unless it was transporting her."

Yes, that sounded like the Systems Alliance brass she'd come to know and occasionally loathe. "Performance reviews?" she asked, though she would have bet her ass on the answer without worrying what she'd be sitting on.

"Ninety-fifth percentile in marksmanship, superior rankings in leadership and combat tactics," her daughter responded. "Does the air just get thinner as rank goes up, or are their heads up their asses for the warmth?"

"A combination of the two, I suspect," Hannah replied, her lips twitching a bit at the blunt query that could have come from Michael's lips. "I trust that you and Captain Anderson are addressing the issue?"

"Already done," Jayce assured her, a hint of smugness creeping out. "Spectres aren't under Alliance control, so I get to pick my crew. She's staying. Got a strong biotic on board, too. Kaidan Alenko. He and Ash are the reason we saved as much as we did on Eden Prime."

Hannah suspected that Kaidan and Ashley would have somewhat different opinions, but she kept those thoughts to herself. Her daughter had squadmates that she felt she could depend on, and that was good enough. She cocked her head, studying Jayce. "I suspect that you're not smirking like that just because you've got a biotic and a black sheep past the Alliance," she observed. "Spill it."

Jayce chuckled. "Never could get anything past you. I've also brought a krogan, a turian and a quarian on board."

"Head-butted the krogan yet?" The recommendation of that particular diplomatic gambit had come to Jayce from Mike, and while Hannah had never had cause to use it, it was reportedly one of the more effective means of dealing with a species to whom belligerence was a more or less perpetual state.

"Yup." Jayce grinned, by far the most genuine smile Hannah had seen in this conversation. "That's how I recruited him in the first place." The grin faded to a more thoughtful expression. "Not sure why he's sticking around, though. He's a bounty hunter, and I never said anything about paying him."

"That's easy enough," Hannah snorted. "Money's a secondary concern to krogan. What they're really interested in is the chance for a good fight." She really didn't want to dwell too much on the implications of that. "So, what are their names?"

Jayce's expression grew wary. "What?"

Hannah rolled her eyes. "Their names, o progeny of mine. I can't very well snoop effectively without them." Well, she could, but it would be harder.

"Mother..." Jayce said warningly.

"Don't 'Mother' me," Hannah shot back, unperturbed. "And don't bother trying to tell me they're classified. I could always ask your Uncle Dave..." She trailed off significantly. Alliance soldiers were one thing, but if her daughter was going to be zooming around the galaxy with a trio of aliens at her back, Hannah Taylor Shepard damn well intended to find out everything there was to know about them.

"All right, all right!" Jayce glowered at her. "The krogan is Urdnot Wrex, and like I said, he's a bounty hunter, so I'm guessing you'll find a fair amount on him, but don't worry. If he causes trouble, I'll dump him. The turian's name is Garrus Vakerian, and he's C-Sec; they've given him a leave of absence to come with us." Her lips quirked a bit. "He's a cocky bastard, but he might be almost as good a shot as he thinks he is, and he's definitely eager to nail the bastard."

Hannah nodded. Say what you would about turians, most of them were strict law and order types who viewed renegades as a personal insult. "And the quarian?" She'd only met a couple in her career; the Flotilla had not yet passed through any of the regions of the galaxy where humanity had settled.

Her daughter looked troubled. "Her name is Tali'Zorah nar Rayya, and she's young, only seventeen. I've done a bit of reading, and they're pretty close to humans on lifespan. Apparently at that age, the fleet sends them out on something called a Pilgrimage, and they have to find something of use to bring back. Seems pretty harsh."

"As opposed to sending our sons and daughters to join the Alliance Navy, you mean?" Hannah inquired gently.

"That's different," Jayce disagreed. "We're with other people: classmates, squadmates. She's out on her own, and she's already come close to getting killed a couple of times."

"So, why take her on board, then?" Hannah pressed., knowing that her daughter hadn't done it on a whim.

"I owe her," Jayce admitted. "She's the one who came up with the evidence that convinced the Council, and that's painted a target on her back. She can't go back to the fleet until she completes her Pilgrimage, and if I put her off the Normandy, she'll be alone again. The Citadel's not safe for her; C-Sec treats quarians like garbage. She does know a lot about the geth, which is something I need." She dropped her eyes, looking almost ashamed at the admission. "I just...don't want to be the one that gets her killed. This isn't her fight."

"If the geth are emerging from the Perseus Veil, that is a matter of concern to the quarians," Hannah corrected her. "She'll be safer with you than alone, and maybe she can meet the requirements of her Pilgrimage while she's helping you."

"Yeah, that's pretty much the conclusion I came to," Jayce said, though she still looked none too pleased. She cocked her head, listening to something that Hannah couldn't hear clearly. "Mom, I need to go. We're almost at the mass relay."

Hannah knew not to ask about their destination. "Have you spoken to your father yet?"

"He's next," Jayce promised. "After we clear the relay." A brief pause, then, "Have you talked to him lately?"

"No. I'm sorry, Jayce, but -"

"I know," Jayce said softly, her eyes sad but understanding. Their family structure had been an unconventional one, but it had worked for twenty-three years. Michael Shepard remained the love of Hannah's life, but he was a pale shadow of the man he'd once been, and conversations between them now always seemed to begin with his simmering resentment that she was still an active and respected Alliance officer and end with his rage when she again refused to buy into the delusions that had ended his career. In some ways, she felt like as much a widow as Lily, and yet, she still wore her simple gold ring and had never so much as looked at another man. "I'll talk to you again when I can."

Hannah nodded. "Lily sends her love."

"Hug her for me." Jayce hadn't been able to face Lily after Akuze, crushed by grief and guilt, though Lily had never blamed her for Gina's death. When she'd begged for forgiveness, Lily had refused, firmly countering that there was nothing to forgive. It had taken time for her to accept that she still had two mothers, still more to come to grips with the knowledge that those two mothers now only had one daughter, but when she did step into that breach, she stood fast. Lily received almost as many e-mails from Jayce as Hannah did, and flowers arrived without fail, regardless of where any of them were posted, on both Hannah's birthday and Lily's, with another bouquet delivered to Lily on Gina's birthday.

"I will. Be careful, Jayce." She'd held that in as long as she could. "Please." She'd thought that when her daughter had earned her N7 designation and the high risk missions that accompanied it that she'd hit the upper limits of her anxiety threshold. She'd been wrong. God, had she been wrong.

"I will. I promise," Jayce assured her. "I love you."

"I love you too." Hannah stared at the emptiness above the console for several seconds after the holographic image of her daughter vanished, waiting for the stinging in her eyes to subside, then left the Comm Room.

She found Lily in the mess kitchen, pulling ingredients from the shelves in the cupboards and coolers that had been set aside for her: flour, butter, brown sugar, vanilla, real chocolate chips, real pecans, real eggs. Lily didn't cook with imitation _anything_, and as had been the case on virtually every ship on which she had served, she had reached an agreement with the mess crew within a couple of weeks: spaghetti nights on the Kilimanjaro were the envy of every other ship in the fleet, and in return, the requisitions officers applied their ingenuity to keeping her preferred ingredients in stock.

Cooking was therapy for Lily; it was a love that she had passed on to Jayce, though the details that she drew as an N7 gave her little time to indulge it. Gina had been too restless and impatient, and after she'd grabbed salt instead of sugar on a batch of snickerdoodles, her mother had given up and allowed her to fill the role of chief taste-tester in the kitchen.

Watching Lily cook was therapy for Hannah; the calmness that her friend possessed elsewhere reached zen-like levels when she was in the kitchen. With lunch cleanup done and another hour or so before dinner prep hit full swing, the kitchen was lightly populated, but Lily nonetheless retired to the corner that was reserved for her and began lining up her ingredients as Hannah recounted the conversation with Jayce.

"Her own ship?" The pride that blazed in the brown eyes burned very nearly as bright as the fire in Hannah's heart, and Lily immediately exchanged the large stainless steel mixing bowl for one that a volus could bathe in.

"You do know that a frigate crews sixty, right?" Hannah inquired, already knowing the answer.

"Turn on the oven," Lily instructed her in lieu of a reply, adding the dry ingredients to the massive bowl as Hannah moved to comply. "Spacers don't have homes. Not like civilians."

Hannah nodded, listening as she put the lid on the fifty-five gallon barrel of flour and wheeled it back to its place. She and Mike had both been born on military bases on Earth; Jayce had been born on the colony world of Demeter, but they'd moved on before she'd been a year old, and rarely spent more than a year in any one place since then.

"Some spacers don't need homes, but for those that do, it's people, not place." Baking soda and a bit of salt joined the flour and were blended in.

"Yes." After three decades of service, even on a new ship, there were familiar faces: people she'd fought alongside in the First Contact War, explored the outer edges of the Attican Traverse with. The relationships formed in the trenches were different from those in civilian life. Even the people that you didn't particularly like, you learned to respect and trust, knowing that no matter how much you got on each others nerves off-duty, in a firefight, they had your back and you had theirs. And for the ones you did like, the bonds that formed were stronger than blood. She could still name every person who had been with her in the Engineering section of the London when they had been dodging the cannons of the Icaritus, still corresponded with most of them regularly, met up for dinner and drinks when their paths crossed. The fires of Hell made an exceptionally powerful forge.

"Jayce thinks she doesn't need that, doesn't want it." The brown eyes were turned downward, focused on the task of creaming together the brown sugar and butter, but Hannah knew the gentle sorrow that was in them; it was a reflection of the hurt in her own heart. Maybe if Gina's body had been recovered, Jayce would have been able to heal more completely...or maybe not. Hannah had seen what was left of Trip; she'd been the closest thing to family the boy had left, and so had seen to his funeral arrangements. She'd steadfastly refused Jayce's demands for information, but her daughter had managed to access the autopsy files anyway, punishing herself with image after image of burned and shattered bodies, searching for her best friend among the carnage. She had never quite matched Lily's sorrowful acceptance of the final incident report, which concluded that the bodies of Gina Santorelli and half a dozen others had either been completely dissolved by the acid secreted by the thresher maws or dragged away from the scene and consumed by the maws, which had presumably been the fate of the original colonists, as well.

"She's afraid of it," Hannah agreed. Applying to the ICT program had been more than Jayce seeking to remedy what she saw as a failure of her own skills on Akuze. By training to become an N7, the best of the best, Jayce had surrounded herself with squadmates who were also the best of the best: badasses who could survive damn near anything thrown at them. Missions were short-term, squadmates changed frequently. Camaraderie undoubtedly developed, but as far as Hannah could tell, Jayce left it on the field of battle. She never talked about her squadmates, never dragged them along when she met with her mother on leave as she had Gina, Trip and others. Hannah doubted that Jayce even consciously realized the distance she maintained, the walls that she had built around her heart.

"She won't be able to help it now." Eggs in the shell were all but unheard of unless they stopped off at a farm colony. Before they left the Utopia System, they would likely go planetside to see if there were any to be obtained from the outlying settlements, but for now, Lily measured beaten eggs from a carton, adding them and turning on the industrial-sized mixer. "Jayce is a guardian, a protector. Give her a crew, and she'll want to keep them all from harm." The rich scent of vanilla touched the air as she opened the bottle, measured and poured, anguished brown eyes lifting to Hannah's. "She won't be able to."

Hannah nodded. "I know," she said in through a throat that felt too tight for words. Soldiers died, even on routine missions, and this one promised to be anything but. Lily hadn't been as close to David Anderson, but she had been aware of what happened, knew what Saren had been capable of twenty years ago, and the ravaged colony below them was vivid proof of what he was capable of now. More lives would be lost before this was done, and her daughter's scarred soul would bear the weight of those losses.

Lily picked up the bowl with the dry ingredients and began adding them to the mixer. Twenty years ago, a similar undertaking with the 'assistance' of Jayce and Gina always ended with a heavy dusting of flour over everyone and everything in the kitchen, but today only small puffs of white billowed up from the bowl as it was deftly added in bit by bit.

"She's going to need support," Lily went on, setting the last of the dry flour aside and beginning to add in the chocolate chips and pecans. "Not just subordinates. Not just squadmates. Friends. Family."

"And cookies will do that?" Hannah smiled, but didn't laugh. To a bunch of grunts subsiding on military chow, home-baked goodies were a holy grail of sorts, and Lily's cookies were their own kind of magic. She'd seen squads of marines transformed into schoolkids by a platter of still-warm cookies set on a table in the messhall.

"Maybe not," Lily admitted with a smile of her own as she added the last of the flour and watched the mixing bowl with a practiced eye before powering it down, "but they'll be a start." She pursed her lips thoughtfully. "Quarians are dextro-amino, like the turians, aren't they? I wonder how similar their recipes are." Having an officer on board who could whip up dextro-amino delicacies was a diplomatic hole card that Admiral Barnes had come to appreciate, with ingredients kept in a separate, very clearly labeled set of bins (both Lily and Hannah having very vivid memories of the time that Gina and Jayce had sampled some dextro rations on a dare). She shrugged. "I'll check the extranet and come up with something tomorrow. Right now-" She pulled out two enormous baking pans and set them on the counter. "Ready?"

Hannah stepped into position, taking up a spoon and beginning to scoop neat balls of dough from the bowl and deposit them onto her pan in rows as neat as soldiers lined up for inspection. For the most part, her cooking skills began and ended at punching in a sequence on a prefab food dispenser, but her role in this particular ritual had been established years before. Not all battles could be fought with weapons, and if cookies and maternal love were all they could offer Jayce, at least she'd be getting a double dose.


End file.
